The Late Bloomer (6 page)

“Hey, Dad. Got the flu?”

“Nah. Just the fuckin' sniffles,” he says, ever the stoic, ever the tough guy with the cigarette butt turning his teeth brown and fingers yellow and his lungs filled with phlegm that he has to hack out every morning in the toilet.

Just by listening to Dad's denials about his poor health, a total stranger may get the impression that he possesses Herculean health and strength. He will have a fever of 102 and snot oozing from his nostrils and gobs of phlegm lodged in his smoky throat, but he still won't concede illness or frailty of any kind; instead, at mid-cough he will place his hand over his heart and pretend he is having a heart attack.

“Oh, no, Kenny,” he says. “You're right. I can't breathe.” (He starts panting.) “I
am
dying. Quick, Kenny. Get me another cigarette!”

But he is a comedian crying on the inside.

After learning more about his abusive childhood, I start thinking that maybe Dad takes such poor care of himself because he thinks so lowly of himself. Maybe he can't express love because, when it comes down to it, he doesn't love himself. I start thinking that maybe he is so hard on us because he doesn't want us to make the mistakes he has made. “Your father used to always say that he was going to be rich before he turned thirty,” my mother told me when I informed her of
my post-trip assessment. “He hates his family; he thought they were a bunch of losers, and he always wanted to get rich and rub it in their faces. That's why he has always been a workaholic.”

That he is. I've grown up hearing him talk about how he has never missed a day of work going back to age fourteen, when he had a newspaper route in Silver Creek; how he had to work at a printing company all through high school because his stepdad made him pay rent to live at home; how he didn't go to college because he couldn't afford it. But a college education, he believes, isn't what matters most. “The hardest worker will always outshine the smartest worker,” he says.

When I'm seven, Dad, who has worked his way up from an ink-stained printing pressman to a tie-wearing department head, founds his own company, Port of Printing. He works fifteen hours a day, six days a week, managing its twenty employees. He eats pizza and Buffalo wings at his desk for lunch and dinner.

Even though he is loath to admit it, the job is killing him. He has been riddled with health problems from his mid-thirties onward. A few times a year an ambulance comes screaming into our driveway and picks up my father. He prefers the fattest, most sugary foods and never exercises but for the occasional game of catch in the side yard. When he rewards me with two Big Macs, large fries and a vanilla milkshake at McDonald's after hockey games, we have to go through the drive-thru because he is too fat to fit in a booth.

Not knowing when or if he will ever return from his increasingly more frequent hospital stays, my stomach knots up with anxiety. I bite my fingernails with the voracity of a rabbit eating carrots. I gnaw the skin around my fingernails. When the skin breaks, I suck the blood till it clots.

Obsessive nail-biting is a habit I have learned from my mom, whom I can imagine sitting at home as a child, chewing her fingers raw, waiting for her “traveling” dad to come home.

Whenever I'm at a friend's house or at the park down the street and I hear ambulance sirens, I hop on my bike and pedal home to make
sure it's not my dad being carted away to Our Lady of Victory Hospital. Ambulance sirens unnerve me well into adulthood.

Most of his emergency-room trips are for kidney stones lodged in his urethra. If the stone is small enough, he passes them. After one particularly excruciating urination, he returns home looking pale and about ten pounds lighter.

“Kenny,” he calls out to me from the couch, where he's been resting continuously for the last few days. “Lemme show you something.” His open palm cradles his just-passed kidney stone. It's a gray pebble, a little smaller than a pea.

“Ouch,” I say, wincing.

“Oh, this is nothin',” he sighs, reaching into his pocket and pulling out another pebble, twice the size of the first one. He rolls the stone onto the coffee table. “Try pushing
this
boulder out of your dick.”

Unsure whether to laugh or cry, I laugh.
Dad is Superman. He can pee rocks!

“No, thanks,” I say, shaking my head in horrified disbelief, feigning amusement with a nervous, disingenuous chuckle.

Dad's urologist warns him that his body will keep producing these acidic kidney deposits unless he changes his diet. That means he must cut out the two-liter bottles of Pepsi he sucks down every day. Predictably, Dad dismisses the doctor as being “a little light in his loafers.”

Dad, who has always said, “You gotta die of something,” ignores the dire warning. Seeing him make amazing recovery after amazing recovery, then joke about it, I actually think he may never die, no matter what he does to his body, so strong is his pugnacious personality.
He can pee rocks!

Then yet another, more intense kidney stone attack strikes. This time he can't take the stinging pain, and it won't pass. He gets an X-ray, which shows a perfectly round stone the size of an olive pit. With his kidneys on the brink of shutting down, he doesn't urinate
for three days. His ankles, wrists and knees swell with fluid, his face bloats till his head looks like a pink soccer ball with eyes, a nose and a mouth painted on it. I'm chewing and spitting out my nails like a woodchuck.

Toxins are backing up into his system and his eyes start turning yellow. When it becomes clear that he is going to die right there in the living room, Dad, who heretofore wouldn't let us call an ambulance, finally relents. Later that day, a surgeon cuts out the stone from his right kidney, a procedure that leaves a purple, ten-inch scar on his side, from his hip to his belly button.

True to character, following the operation, sick of hospital “dog food” and “bitchy” nurses wiping his butt and constantly telling him what to do, my dad puts on his slippers and leaves. By the time Mom and Kevin arrive, he is sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby with his suitcase in his lap and smoking a cigarette.

I hear a car door slam and look out the front picture window and see Dad shuffling up the driveway in his blue hospital-issued slippers, wincing with every baby step. He isn't even forty years old, but his stiff body dawdles like an old geezer's. Seeing the man I've always considered the strongest, most invincible man in the universe lamely inching up the driveway unsettles me in a way that his fights with Mom, his arguments with my brothers, never have. This scene is different. My dad, the consummate tough guy who never complains of being sick, who rolls up his sleeves and flexes every time that Duracell commercial comes on and Robert Conrad dares the audience to knock the battery off his shoulder—if
he
can be this weak and vulnerable, what does that say about me?

I am eleven years old but still sleep with a stuffed bear (I hide it under my pillow so my brothers and father don't see it). I play tough on the ice, but beneath that bulky goalie equipment is a flabby boy with love handles jutting out wider than his shoulders who feels athletically inferior to every player he's ever competed against. When I flex
my biceps, no muscles bulge. I also worry too much—like a woman, my dad says—about the Soviets dropping the bomb on us, about my older brothers getting hurt by my hot-tempered dad when he punches them in the gut for lipping off, about my little brother getting kidnapped whenever he goes to the playground without me. I worry about never amounting to anything in life and ending up stuck in Buffalo. I worry that my dad will die soon. Jagged fingernails and bloody cuticles are totems of my neuroses.

These worries haunt me as I watch the childlike man shuffling the soles of his feet on the blacktop driveway he poured himself on a humid summer day just a few months ago. Now look at him: near death, a pathetic ghost of the macho man I've always known.

The top of Mom's shoulder supports him under one armpit, Kevin's under the other, as he slowly makes his way through the front door and toward the three-cushion couch. I watch from across the living room, out of their way. They each shove a hand under one of his armpits as he readies to squat on the couch, which my mother has lined with a sheet, blankets and some extra pillows.

“I can do it myself,” Dad says. “Let go of me.” He can be the most belligerent man on Earth when he wants something.
This is a good sign. He's still tough.

They let go of him—holding their hands inches from his side, just in case—as gravity plops his butt onto the sofa. Upon landing, Dad sucks in a pocket of air and bites his lower lip.

Ooooooooooooo
 . . .

“Larry,” Mom, reaching for his side, says, “watch the bag!”

A yellowish stain expands on the side of his loose-fitting dress shirt. Mom unbuttons his shirt and grabs hold of a see-through plastic bag that is connected to a catheter implanted in his right side. The seal between the bag and the catheter has broken, sending urine rushing down my father's back, onto the fresh sheets Mom has just carefully lain down.

Kevin dabs the urine with a towel as Mom frantically searches my
dad's suitcase for a fresh bag. I come over and offer help, but Mom barks at me to go to my room. I do. I run upstairs and bury my head under a pillow, silencing the moans coming from downstairs.

—

Once again, Dad's recovery is amazingly rapid, as if he has the ability to will his kidneys back to normal function. Within two weeks he is back at work, spending his usual fifteen hours a day at the office. But Dad never quite regains the strength he had before that surgery. The days when he plays catch with one of us become as rare as incidents of him and Mom kissing in public.

A year after his surgery, his right testicle balloons to the size of a tennis ball. An infection in his epididymis, a duct on the testicle through which sperm passes, has caused this most inhumane swelling.

Doctors inform my mom that this condition often—but not always—is sexually transmitted, meaning he might have gotten it from a woman. Mom tells me that she never has had any venereal diseases: She has only slept with one man—my father—her entire life. After the surgeon removes a portion of his testicle, my mom confronts Dad about the exact cause of the infection. He swears he has never cheated on her. Mom, one hundred percent financially dependent on my father, is totally unprepared to do anything about it if he has cheated on her. Understandably, she gives him the benefit of the doubt.

Her forgiveness, though, can't keep my dad from his own self-destructiveness. Following the testicle episode, he spirals into a deep depression. He snores away in the bedroom, with the door shut and curtains drawn, day after day after day. When he is up, he's watching reruns from the
Get Smart
era. They're sitcoms, but he doesn't laugh. He doesn't even go to work. He's not angry, he's . . . just . . . there.

“Dad's chewing Valium like candy,” Kevin tells me one day. “I hope the miserable bastard ODs.”

I don't know what Valium is, but I'm smart enough to know that it's not for happy people. I leave Dad alone. I try to cheer him up by
bringing him a bowl of salt-and-vinegar chips—his favorite—or a glass of pop. “Thanks, Kenny,” he says. “You're a good son.”

—

As soon as Dad comes out of his “slump,” he returns to snarling at Mom whenever they are around each other more than ten minutes.

They fight constantly, in fact. Their bedroom is next to mine. I hear all their bickering, word for dirty word. They call each other the worst names in the Book of Defamation (
whore, slut, bastard, fat shit
). I bury my head under a pillow to muffle it.

My mother, who has since tired of being just a stay-at-home mom, has begun working for the Hamburg Town Clerk's office, where she grants, ironically enough, marriage licenses. My father resents her job and the freedom she now enjoys after a lifetime of servitude to him, and to us. When she comes home late from work, he's convinced she must be having an affair with someone in the office.

My parents fight about everything: money, the car payment, the print shop, the dog shitting all over the side yard and no one picking it up. It's pathetic, really.

Judging from my hockey success, I believe God answers my prayers. So I start praying for another miracle: that He will put them—and Kevin, Keith, Kyle, Kris and me—out of their middle-aged misery with a heavenly annulment. . . .
God, I really hope you will make a lot of people happy by getting my parents divorced. In the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. . . .

Soon, through the paper-thin wall separating my room from theirs, I hear my parents talking—make that
shouting
—about getting a divorce.
Thanks, Big Guy.

The morning after one particularly bombastic clash, however, Dad calls Mom at work, and I fear that God might have gone a little too far in answering my prayers.

“Marcia,” Dad says calmly, “I have a gun in my hand, and you
know what? I'm gonna blow my head off this afternoon.” He's on the Indian reservation, thirty minutes south of us. “I'm going to make you and everyone else very happy today. I'm gonna blow my fucking brains out.” Before hanging up, he closes with an inappropriately sunny, “Bye!”

Mom immediately calls the police, who promptly issue an all-points bulletin for his arrest.
White male . . . 40 . . . black hair . . . armed and dangerous.
The police suggest that my mother take me, Kyle and Kris to a safe place where we can hide out until they find the suicidal gunman that my father suddenly has become.

Mom picks us up from school and drives us straight to Gramma's house in Silver Creek. She cries the whole ride as we listen to the all-news radio station, anxiously expecting to hear breaking news about a mad gunman on the loose.