Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (88 page)

I do belong here. I do know what I’m doing.

Beyond another set of doors I reach a small group dressed in Dutch costumes, wooden clogs, including the mayor and his wife, who were on stage earlier to thank Pat Boone for celebrating the Tulip Time Festival. Beside them is another security guard, this one a teenage boy, murmuring into his walkie-talkie. I approach, wanting to ask him where I might find Pat Boone. I decide to throw myself on his mercy. I’m prepared to beg, plead, cry. I will say I’ve been waiting my whole life. I will say the Voice of God Himself told me to speak to Pat Boone.

The guard continues to mumble into his walkie-talkie. For a few more minutes I patiently wait for him to finish, until anxiety floods me. Suppose I miss him? He might be preparing to leave the building right this minute. He’ll disappear before I find him. Then, as if pulled by unseen forces, I turn away from the guard. I retrace my footsteps back through the set of doors.

I glimpse a white shirt. The back of a man’s head. Brown hair. Him.

He and another man are just opening a door farther down the corridor.

I yell, “Mr. Boone. Pat Boone.”

I rush after him, grabbing the door about to shut behind him. We’re in a small foyer just behind the stage. Not understanding the force of my need, the other man tries to shoo me away. I ignore him, pleading, “Mr. Boone. I have to speak to you. Just for a minute. I’ve been waiting. Pat Boone.”

I push past the assistant and stand right in front of Pat Boone. His red and blue sequined jacket is off. He’s in his white shirt, white pants, white shoes. His face is still in makeup. He has few wrinkles. His eyes are almost expressionless. It’s as if his whole life all he’s practiced is his public smile, and the rest of his face is frozen — but familiar to me — the way he looked in the photograph. And there they are as he smiles at me, albeit tentatively: his white-white teeth.

My words are garbled, rushed, confused. I don’t know how much time I have, when I will be removed. So much to explain. I hardly know where to start. I tell him how much I loved the photograph in
Life
magazine.

“Oh, yes, that tandem bicycle,” he says. “I remember that.”

“But you saved my life,” I say.

I am telling him about my father, what happened with my father, that it was he, Pat Boone…just knowing he existed kept me going…just seeing his photograph helped me stay alive…that he represented — what word do I use? “Safety?” “Holiness”? “Purity”? He has taken a step back, away from me. His smile may have dimmed by one decibel. Am I acting like a crazy woman? Am I the first woman who has ever pursued him to confess that her father once hurt her, and that he, Pat Boone, represented hope? Just thinking that one day he might…

“Well, I’m glad to know that I did something good,” he says. “That I helped someone.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. “You were everything. Your family. Your daughters.”

“I guess these things happen a lot,” he says. “To children. It’s terrible.”

“Here.” I give him the letter. “This will explain how I felt.”

He takes the letter, folded in an envelope. That hand — those clean fingers I studied by the hour.

“I’ll write back to you,” he says. “After I read it.”

My audience with him is over. “Thank you,” I whisper, turning to leave.

I pause in the parking lot in the damp spring night. The massive walls of the church loom over me. Busloads of grandmothers rumble from the lot.

I was too overwhelmed to tell him about the magnifying glass or his wristwatch. Nor did I say, “I want you to adopt me” — the one thing I’ve most wanted. Of course, even I know how crazy that would sound. Besides, is it even still true?

I get in my car and shut the door. But I continue to watch the church. Maybe I’ll catch one last glimpse of him. Him. Did he help sustain me all those years? Did he offer hope?

Yes. His image. His milky-white image.

That sterile pose. I conjured him into the man I needed him to be: a safe father. By my believing in that constant image, he did save me, with out my being adopted, with out my even asking.

At the end of the concert, the mayor of Holland and his wife came on stage to present Pat Boone with a special pair of wooden clogs painted to resemble his trademark bucks. Again, I had to lower the binoculars, embarrassed for him, unable to watch, just as when he gave the tulips to that young girl.

I wonder if anyone else in the audience felt uncomfortable when this father, this grandfather, tried to coerce a kiss from that adolescent girl? Or did anyone notice her embarrassment, her shame? No, that’s not a thought that would trouble any of Pat Boone’s fans in Calvary. But Calvary doesn’t exist for me, cannot be made to exist for me — even by Pat Boone.

Pat Boone! Those two short syllables have stretched the length of my life. So regardless of religion or illusion, his love letters offered me improbable safety — grooved in vinyl, etched in sand.

Floyd Skloot

 

FLOYD SKLOOT
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947. He is the author of four books of nonfiction, including a trilogy of memoirs:
In the Shadow of Memory
, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a finalist for both the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and PEN Award for the Art of the Essay;
A World of Light
; and
The Wink of the Zenith
. His essays have been included in
The Best American Essays
,
The Best American Science Writing
,
The Pushcart Prize Anthology
,
The Best Food Writing
,
The Art of the Essay
, and
The Fourth Genre
, and in such publications as
The New York Times Magazine
,
American Scholar
,
Antioch Review
,
Boulevard
,
Creative Nonfiction
,
Sewanee Review
,
Southwest Review
,
Virginia Quarterly Review
, and
Witness
. He has also published six collections of poetry and four novels. Skloot lives in Portland, Oregon.

 

The psychiatrist’s office was in a run-down industrial section at the northern edge of Oregon’s capital, Salem. It shared space with a chiropractic health center, separated from it by a temporary divider that wobbled in the current created by opening the door. When I arrived, a man sitting with his gaze trained on the spot I suddenly filled began kneading his left knee, his suit pants hopelessly wrinkled in that one spot. Another man, standing beside the door and dressed in overalls, studied the empty wall and muttered as he slowly rose on his toes and sank back on his heels. Like me, neither seemed happy to be visiting Dr. Peter Avilov.

Dr. Avilov specialized in the psychodiagnostic examination of disability claimants for the Social Security Administration. He made a career of weeding out hypochondriacs, malingerers, fakers, people who were ill with out organic causes. There may be many such scam artists working the disability angle, but there are also many legitimate claimants. Avilov worked as a kind of hired gun, paid by an agency whose financial interests were best served when he determined that claimants were not disabled. It was like having your house appraised by the father-in-law of your prospective buyer, like being stopped by a traffic cop several tickets shy of his monthly quota, like facing a part-time judge who works for the construction company you’re suing. Avilov’s incentives were not encouraging to me.

I understood why I was there. After a virus I contracted in December of 1988 targeted my brain, I became totally disabled. When the Social Security Administration had decided to reevaluate my medical condition eight years later, they exercised their right to send me to a doctor of their own choosing. This seemed fair enough. But after receiving records, test results and reports of brain scans, and statements from my own internal medicine and infectious diseases physicians, all attesting to my ongoing disability, and after requiring twenty-five pages of handwritten questionnaires from me and my wife, they scheduled an appointment for me with Avilov. Not with an independent internal medicine or infectious diseases specialist, not with a neurologist, but with a shrink.

Now, twelve years after first getting sick, I’ve become adept at being brain damaged. It’s not that my symptoms have gone away: I still try to dice a stalk of celery with a carrot instead of a knife, still reverse
p
and
b
when I write, or draw a primitive hourglass when I mean to draw a star. I call our
bird feeder
a
breadwinner
and place newly purchased packages of frozen corn in the dishwasher instead of the freezer. I put crumpled newspaper and dry pine into our woodstove, strike a match and attempt to light the metal door. Preparing to cross the “main street” in Carlton, Oregon, I looked both ways, saw a pickup truck a quarter mile south, took one step off the curb, and landed flat on my face, cane pointing due east.

So I’m still much as I was in December of 1988, when I first got sick. I spent most of a year confined to bed. I couldn’t write and had trouble reading anything more complicated than
People
magazine or the newspaper’s sports page. The functioning of memory was shattered, bits of the past clumped like a partly assembled jigsaw puzzle, the present a flicker of discontinuous images. With out memory, it was impossible for me to learn how to operate the new music system that was meant to help me pass the time, or figure out why I felt so confused, or take my medications with out support.

But in time I learned to manage my encounters with the world in new ways. I shed what no longer fit the life: training shoes and road-racing flats, three-piece suits and ties, a car. I bought a cane. I seeded my home with pads and pens so that I could write reminders before forgetting what I’d thought. I festooned my room with color-coded Post-it notes telling me what to do, whom to call, where to locate important items. I remarried, finding love when I imagined it no longer possible. Eventually, I moved to the country, slowing my external life to match its internal pace, simplifying, stripping away layers of distraction and demands.

Expecting the unexpected now, I can, like an improvisational actor, incorporate it into my performance. For instance, my tendency to use words that are close to — but not exactly — the words I’m trying to say has led to some surprising discoveries in the composition of sentences.

A freshness emerges when the mind is unshackled from its habitual ways. In the past, I never would have described the effect of a viral attack on my brain as being “geezered” overnight if I hadn’t first confused the words
seizure
and
geezer.
It is as though my word-finding capacity has developed an associative function to compensate for its failures of precision, so I end up with
shellac
instead of
plaque
when trying to describe the gunk on my teeth. Who knows, maybe James Joyce was brain damaged when he wrote
Finnegans Wake
and built a whole novel on puns and neologisms that were actually symptoms of disease.

It’s possible to see such domination of the unexpected in a positive light. So getting lost in the familiar woods around our house and finding my way home again adds a twist of excitement to days that might seem circumscribed or routine because of my disability. When the natural food grocery where we shop rearranged its entire stock, I was one of the few customers who didn’t mind, since I could never remember where things were anyway. I am less hurried and more deliberate than I was; being attentive, purposeful in movement, lends my life an intensity of awareness that was not always present before. My senses are heightened, their fine-tuning mechanism busted: spicy food, stargazer lilies in bloom, birdsong, heat, my wife’s vivid palette when she paints have all become more intense and stimulating. Because it threatens my balance, a sudden breeze is something to stop for, to let its strength and motion register. That may not guarantee success — as my pratfall in Carlton indicates — but it does allow me to appreciate detail and nuance.

One way of spinning this is to say that my daily experience is often spontaneous and exciting. Not fragmented and intimidating, but unpredictable, continuously new. I may lose track of things, or of myself in space, my line of thought, but instead of getting frustrated I try to see this as the perfect time to stop and figure out what I want or where I am. I accept my role in the harlequinade. It’s not so much a matter of making lemonade out of life’s lemons but rather of learning to savor the shock, taste, texture, and after effects of a mouthful of unadulterated citrus.

Acceptance
is a deceptive word. It suggests compliance, a consenting to my condition and to who I have become. This form of acceptance is often seen as weakness, submission. We say
I accept my punishment.
Or
I accept your decision.
But such assent, while passive in essence, does provide the stable, rocklike foundation for coping with a condition that will not go away. It is a powerful passivity, the Zen of Illness, that allows for endurance.

There is, however, more than endurance at stake. A year in bed, another year spent primarily in my recliner — these were times when endurance was the main issue. But over time, I began to recognize the possibilities for transformation. I saw another kind of acceptance as being viable, the kind espoused by Robert Frost when he said “Take what is given, and make it over your own way.” That is, after all, the root meaning of the verb to
accept
, which comes from the Latin
accipere
, or “take to oneself.” It implies an embrace. Not a giving up but a welcoming.