Oedipussy (14 page)

"Yes." Her head bobbed pleasantly. A smile. I could have said anything.

We became great friends. I learned that she was a tremendous listener that I could unload on whenever I was having a bad day. Ester could only say "yes" because of her stroke, and she needed my attention as much as I needed her affirmation.

Thom was the other connection I made in rehab. He was my physical therapist,  gigantic at seven and a half feet tall. He had long, dark brown hair and the look of a Samoan who was two steps away from murder.

Thom approached physical therapy like a drill sergeant. Every moment of my therapy, four hours a day in their efforts to get me out of the hospital as soon as they could, brought shouts and tasks hammered at a speedy clip. It was stressful and liberating. I felt the progress I was making at the end of each day.

"...and I somehow need to push myself up from my chair and reach over to that bar and let myself down on the toilet? What if it rolls away?"

"YOU PINSY-ASS FECK," and when he shouted, his south Pacific accent shone like daggers in his deep voice, “HOW A'YOU WORRY ABOUT THE WHEELCHAIR ROLLING AWAY WIT' PISS DRIBBLIN' DAWN YA LEG WAITIN' TA' LONG IN THE DRUG STORE LINE TO BUY YOUR TAMPONS?! GET DA'DICK OUT'CHA MOUTH, LIFT YA'SELF UP, AND SIT ON DA CAN."

Of course I ended up doing it. Sitting on the toilet, it became apparent that I had nothing to worry about.

"Well! I did it," I observed optimistically.

"Yes, y'did," he replied. When I wasn't working toward some goal in my therapeutic process, he turned into a gigantic, burly puppy dog. His eyes turned from bulging red marbles to cool brown orbs. His accent lessened, and his voice warmed. "Let me know if is too much. Sometime you need some motivation. I can turn it off if you need.”

"Sure."

"You had good coach in high school?"

"I didn't like sports."

"Well, you have good coach now."

At the end of our sessions, he would pump a meaty hand toward me and wrap his arm around me in a burly hug. He was all business, but as much of a snugly bunny as he was a tough stone.

Thom taught me many methods of maneuvering my new lot in life. He helped me tone my muscles as much he helped to tone my mind to take on my new challenges. Never had there been anything so difficult in this life, and I hadn't even started.

This life. Starting this life...

When my mind wandered down this lane, I had the most difficulty.

I was in the rehabilitation center and hospital for six months of my forty-third year. If I lived to be seventy-five, that meant that I only had a little over thirty years left of existence. I used up half the time left I had on this earth in a hospital. I was in a coma for more of my life than I was not. Most of that time wouldn't be usable. It wouldn't be anything but wheelchair and discrimination and sexless sorrowful loneliness.

Bill was my useless therapist. He waas everyone's therapist in the rehab center, and went room to room for his sessions. He had asked if I had considered ruminating on the small moments that I had that made life worthwhile. I had very little that I could consider to be worthwhile small moments. Was one overcoming needing help with taking a shit? Or bathing while someone stood there with me? Learning that my dreams were completely dead at this point, or that the life I have lived with fame and enjoyment and fulfillment was nothing more than a coma dream? Hell, even the mundane was depressing - Michael Jackson was dead. Michael fucking Jackson.

"I never realized that you were a fan," he responded.

"I wasn't."

"Well?"

"Well, I mean, I listened to Thriller so many times as a child that the tape wore out and my mom needed to buy me another. I guess I was a fan. But you know, over the years his escapades with the law and the tabloids and his getting whiter and whiter, or whatever... I thought everyone lost patience."

"You know, Todd, they gave him an autopsy. He died because he had overdosed on drugs administered to him by his doctor. Turns out he actually had vitiligo universalis - that pigment disease he said he had the whole time."

Therapist Bill was just making small talk, but there was a little jewel in this.

"Here is a little moment of happiness. I hope everyone who wrote something about his skin ate their words. There was probably a thousand retractions printed after that," I said. “Here is a small moment.”

"I don't think tabloids print retractions," he clarified.

"True."

"Do you think you can find a little joy in your existence, though? Look at little moments and take them like these little diamonds to polish in your mind and ignore the little things?"

"It is just too much. Every moment. There are still troops in Iraq. Still troops in Iraq. What, has it been thirty years at this point?"

"Well, not exactly. Nine-eleven."

"Nine-eleven. Everyone is nine-elevening me. What is nine-eleven."

"One thing at a time..."

"One thing at a time."

"Yes. Let's change the subject... Your family's lawyer wants to come in and speak with you. Are you ready?"

"About what?"

"The estate, what happens next. It looks like you will be out of here soon."

"I will be out of here soon?"

"Your doctor tells me that everything is looking fine, and they are just checking some final things. Your PT thinks you're there. Your OT. Your doctor is on the far end of the needle on your potential health complications, but you can eat and use the bathroom. Personally, I'm not sure you are ready, but that is only because of your overall lack of progress with me. You still remain somewhat resistant to-"

"-I have been doing my best. This is a lot to process." Poor Bill. It's me, not you. Let's break up.

"I know that. I was able to make some contacts for you and got you some therapists that do home visits on a regular basis. The best part is that it's all wrapped into this treatment. You will have it if you need it. You do need it, Todd. But that's entirely up to you."

"Thank you."

"There's also a nurse that will visit daily, and Thom will be visiting regularly as well. He is on the payroll here, but does home visits as an independent contractor to patients he likes on evenings and weekends.

"The timeframe on this is within the week, Todd."

"I think I can handle that. But what about Ester?"

"Who?"

"Kidding."

"Okay."

The next week passed with the introduction of more exotic foods. More meetings than I had the entire hospitalization. The lawyer leaving the house and all of the money from my parents to me indicated that there were no relatives, no family friends, nothing left that he knew of. He assured me that everything would be okay.

Oh, and here is what we deducted for our services.

Oh, and this is what we deducted to convert the house into a handicap-accessible building (Which may very well have cost the same as razing my parent's house and building an entirely new handicap-accessible house on the rubble...) (Or in the sky above it...) (With jets and fusion-compatible antigravity technology).

As this wrapped up, I needed someone to talk to and to be there for me. I needed it more than anything.

"...and the truth is that I don't know what's next. I'm scared."

"Yes."

"Scared, lonely, lonely and scared. It is as if there is nothing to my life now but to be the first forty-something orphan. I have been orphaned by my parents, my friends, and my own death and resurrection. Death is my parents now, and soon Death will chastise me. It makes no sense. What sense is there in life, when this responsibility comes all at once, and you have so little to do with it?"

"Yes."

"I will sit at home and watch television and eat TV dinners and waste away into a loafer in a chair, simply because I can't get out of the chair. I can't move but for where my wheels can carry me."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry... I'll make it. I have no other choice."

"Yes."

Ester smiled at me with her bright red suckling mouth. It was ghastly.

I had one chance to get it right. I have - I had - I have - I had. One chance. I was quiet, and Ester sat across from me, and she was quiet and kept nodding. I smelled urine. It was urine all the time.

"I have one chance," I told her.

"Yes," Ester replied.

"Yes," I responded.

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Yes."

Yes.

The steep stairs led to the stench of must and mold and basement rot. It was an intoxicating, familiar discomfort. My wheelchair was idle and empty across the kitchen. I sat at the top of the basement stairs.

A cold, still air of death wafted up. The basement hung damp. Like the rest of the house, there was no comfort in the familiarity of anything. Home was a crypt.

I had to carefully move down each plywood step, one at a time. I moved my butt from the top of a stair down to the next step. Then, I picked up and moved my left leg down one. I moved my right leg down one. I edged my butt down again, left leg, right leg. Butt. Left leg. Right leg. Butt. Left leg. Right leg.

As I crept, panted, and dripped to the halfway step, I began to see the bottoms of the washer and dryer resting on the concrete floor. Two things became apparent as the angular shadows grabbed my attention. One, was that laundry was not a part of my transition to having a handicap accessible house. It also became apparent that I hadn't turned the light on.

At least I got my ramps, stair lift to the second floor, and handrails.

I was drained. I bent to look into the basement. The air hung still. It hadn't moved in twenty five years. Dust hung in sparkly clouds, bars of light striking from the small foundation windows. Stacks of puzzles and board games, laundry detergent boxes with a bed of dust resting on top, even a basket with some clothes. Everything rested. Idle.

Despite the effort, I descended to the bottom. I looked under the stairs, and dad's tools lounged on a workbench with drawers and a little table that would be at knee height if I could stand. There was a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. There was a pair of old glasses. There was a pipe with tobacco ash. Dad rarely drank, rarely smoked, and rarely used his glasses, but these wholesome dusty artifacts were divine evidence that he existed where there was nothing else.

My arms pulled me from the bottom of the stairs to where the band practiced. Here was the rug. A few silvery broken E strings and clipped string tips coated the carpet in a glittery patina. I pulled myself. A sharp pain bit into my hand. The tip of a string was jabbed in the meat below my thumb. Electric pain shocked me as I removed the inch of wire from the tender flesh.

I spread my arms out.

I put my face in the carpet.

I lay still.

Breathe. Stumble in my breathing. Musk and mildew, and this deathly air is my new existence.

The heir of death.

Breathe.

My notebook still sat at the corner of the carpeting. I pulled myself over, and held it under me without opening it. The years and the humidity left the book crinkly and hydrated.

I don't know what I expected to find in the basement.

The band's gear, all neatly stacked and ready to play? A stack of posters and tapes and stickers and CDs of our recording session? Photos of thousands of fans screaming for us in Boston?

The inauthenticity of my life gripped me as I struggled to recognize what was real and what was not. I was eighteen, and then I was forty-three.

I wept with my face in the carpet, my hand sore with a stabbing throb of intramuscular heartbreak. I felt my heart beat in my hand, stabbed through with a guitar string. I cried and drooled. I was an animal in the face of a dank, dark cellar facing down the decline of my existence. There was nothing on this planet. There was nothing.

This house was full of my nothing. My inheritance. My kingdom. There was a blue plastic watering can. There was a box with Monopoly in it and a bunch of rubber bands hanging off of a screw. There was three quarters of a box of laundry detergent. There was copper piping hanging from brackets on the ceiling and wispy fiberglass insulation that looked like my disheveled, forty-three-years too-long-for-this-world feather of hair. There was a ghost mask. There was a mason jar of coins. There was a stack of videocassettes.

This wasn't a home - it was a museum.

A museum of shit.

I dragged myself back to the work bench with my notebook. I pulled myself up the bench. I took a long, hard drag from the bottle of whiskey. The bottle and the notebook accompanied me to the stairs.

By the time I made it to the top, I was out of breath and warm with a hazy heightened higher brain. I had never had more than a sip of alcohol before. This was a release into control of something without a care about anything else. Paranoia gripped my boozy organs, not knowing how fragile I still was. I didn't care.

What was left that I could work with?

My notebook was beside the bottle on the table.

I took another drag.

I struggled back into my wheelchair.

Everything was the same. There was the avocado linoleum, the coffee maker, the refrigerator, and the oven. They were practically new when we bought them when I was fifteen. Twelve o'clock blinked on the microwave. I had to drink this house slowly.

My mind fuzzed from the bourbon, and I took up the notebook.

There were lyrics and notes, bad teenage poetry and terrible jokes. It was a mess of junk, thoughts, lists of books to read, movies to see, and musings of a kid approaching eighteen. It was terrible. Who did I think I was? Did I really think I was going to change the world with this junk?

I came to a page with Jenny's phone number.

I closed the basement door, and next to the door was the telephone on the wall.

I had to reach beyond my reach and tip the wheelchair to get to the telephone. I hit it with my fingertips and popped the whole thing off the wall. The cord that attached it to the plate caught the base, and it fell into wires and pieces.

The familiar dialtone.

I began to dial Jenny's number from the notebook until I realized I still had it memorized. I finished without looking.

"Hello?" A friendly and youthful female voice answered. I wanted to respond, 'Jenny?' but revised my answer.

"Hi. I'm sorry this is a weird call, but my name is Todd. Is there a Jenny that lives there?"

"You have the wrong number. There's no Jenny here."

"Okay. I don't want to bother you. Have you had this number long?"

"As long as I can remember - as long as we've lived here."

"Thank you. Sorry, again."

I hung up.

What did I expect?

Practically an entire mortgage could be paid in the amount of time I had spent in the hospital.

I wheeled myself into the living room. The room was taupe with wood paneling, and at its center was a great grey glass television diving bell in a frame. It sat in the room as stout and imposing as a console radio. It was in sharp contrast to the hospital's chalkboard televisions.

With my notebook and the bottle on my lap, I turned the hulk on. The picture slowly hummed to life, and a program on the history station counted down the most important events of the turn of the millennium. I began to feel satisfied, warm, and carefree. I flipped through the notebook.

My adolescent musings were cute and unidirectional. Optimistic fantasy ruminated on every manner of imagined success. My empire of nothing was built from the ground up by a mind that seemed to think that the future was in his hands. Like anything was possible. I molded the clay of vanity and self-image, and here I sat in my wheelchair throne wearing the crown of these dreams.

I was still here, and had the sweetness of hindsight to speak to this child. This child, a child who had everything and the means to do it. Oh, child. The foundation of your empire is built upon the lies of the American Dream.

I would be lucky if I had any time left to reinvent myself in what little time I had left. I lived a siren song, and now I would be lucky for a semblance of drivel.

The announcers on the show began covering the history of Bill Clinton. Apparently he had been impeached for lying under oath about a relationship that he had with an intern at the White House named Monica Lewinsky.

Coincidentally, I was browsing my collection of band names. Looking down the list, I saw "President Member," "All The President's Members," and "Oedipresident." I immediately returned to that high school history class, and writing these ideas.

Learning it was the president's member that seemed to have undone the president was delicious.

I took another pull of bourbon.

Could we have been famous simply by virtue of our band name?

Everything was so much simpler. I had nothing to worry about as a teenager, and yet I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. The weight of success, the weight of making it, and the weight of being able to do all of this with as little effort as possible. These were things that we should have been able to do. If, rather than having this fantasy to become a famous rock star I attended college and tried to align myself with the traditional way of things, there is no question that none of this would have happened. I'm here because of my vanity. John could have gone to coll-

And I noticed that even my thought process was tinged with elements from the fictional dreamverse I existed in for the last twenty-five years. The last twenty-five years felt like only three or four weeks, and in reality all I had to show for any of it is this notebook and the memory of having made a crappy tape and show at a coffee shop.

It was absurd.

At least I graduated high school.

I think?

No. That was after the coffee shop night.

I didn't even have a real or fictional memory of graduating high school. It never happened.

The story was as holy as the holes in my brain and in my existence, and mere nothingness.

The doorbell rang.

I wheeled myself through the kitchen and opened the side door. Standing at the door was a large woman in her late forties with windblown grey hair. It was cool. She wore a jacket that was too large and wintry for the weather. Four plastic supermarket bags hung from her arms.

"Hi, I am Susan King. I'm your new social worker from the state to help you with your transition to your independence. Can I come in?"

I wheeled into the kitchen.

"Can I get you anything? Tea or something? I've been trying to figure this out. I don't know if the oven works - I can't reach the dials or the kettle."

"No, I'm fine, thank you. That's something we can work on." She eyed the bourbon on the table. "Drinking is not a good idea on your first day back."

"Oh, that. I don't drink. It was my dad's. I was going through some things just to see what was here, that's all." She pursed her lips. I was still a little drunk and warm. So I was a forty-something cripple who smelled like booze talking about his booze being someone else's. Oldest trick in the book.

"I've brought you some groceries - just some simple things you don't need to cook. Cup of soup, sandwiches, things like that.

"I will be coming a couple times a week, and right now it looks like you have me from eleven to one on Tuesdays and Fridays. I can stay here and help around the house, or we can do some OT things to help you. I can do laundry, cleaning things, or I can bring you on some errands. I'm here for whatever you need."

"That sounds helpful. Thank you."

"I have some paperwork you need to fill out before I go. Besides that, what would you like to do today?"

The television yammered on in the other room. Television was not productive. Calling my high school girlfriend was not productive. Crying in the basement and drinking my dad's booze was not productive.

I wanted to see Twin Falls. I wanted to go to the library. I wanted to do everything.

"Can we go see the town? Just...drive around and see everything? Is that something we can do?"

"Sure is."

She brought me into the living room, and I filled out her paperwork. It was a stack of income tax statements, disability forms, insurance forms, and all manner of other single copy statements asked, under penalty of perjury, if I was truly paralyzed. Some of the forms were about my parents' retirement. They had it held in escrow to take care of my care and the house after their death. I had three quarters of a million dollars in a mutual fund that guaranteed a steady income year to year in addition to the additional Social Security and Disability payments. Apparently the short period I worked at Kinkos allowed me to receive benefits in the event something like this happened. As it stood, I didn't need to worry about money.