Will & I (14 page)

“No offense,” I said, “but why would anyone come here willingly?” The high, enclosing fence and the complete absence of a smile on every uniformed cadet we saw looked like punishment to me.

He paused for effect and announced, “Struck-shah.”

Jack kept in shape with a personal trainer, who was also the owner of a gym in town. I started going there, as well—not to the elite, private room Jack went to with his trainer, but the main floor. People stared at first, but after a while I became a familiar sight, since I went there so much. I didn't mind. It didn't mean they talked to me, but at least they acknowledged me.

I'd never been very rigorous when it came to working out, but I became religious about making time. As with the voice lessons, I saw results instantly, especially after Jack's trainer gave me an individualized set of exercises. My body still had very little natural tension or balance in it. My default position was like that of a collapsed marionette—one side weakened, the other spastic. Nothing was holding me up. Staying vertical involved a conscious exertion of strength, and I had to center my weight over my feet. So as my muscles developed, my posture and my stability improved dramatically. I no longer had to go around feeling like I might bust my ass every second.

 

24

When Will and I were in high school, the Home Depot came to Birmingham. Its aisled warehouses and ubiquitous customer service have since become a model for many other chains, but it was somewhat revolutionary at the time. One weekend my father went to one in a shopping center near our house, whether just to browse or for something specific, I don't know. As he was walking back to his car in the fairly crowded lot, a man appeared beside him and started chatting. My father returned the small talk. (He was not only a master of small talk, he could cut people off just as quickly. “Well, good enough.”) Once they reached his car, the man, obviously realizing his plan wasn't working out as smoothly as envisioned, reached into my father's inside jacket pocket as he was climbing behind the wheel and took his wallet. From my father's recounting of the incident, I don't know how the man could have thought this would be taken as just an accidental brush, but apparently he did. My father hadn't seen the man take it, but he felt it leave his pocket. Nevertheless, he patted his chest and said, “You son of a bitch, you just took my wallet.”

The man said, “Sir, I don't know what you're talking about.” My father said he just had it next to his glasses and now it's not there. Then the man said, “You're welcome to frisk me if you don't believe me.” He knew then he was part of a scam. The man had passed the wallet off to someone else walking by at just the right moment that my father hadn't noticed, but my father frisked him anyway. He of course didn't find it. The man said he must have dropped it on the floor and said he would go check himself. My father followed him back inside, but of course it wasn't there either. The man even offered to take his card and call him if it turned up.

I don't know if the man just expected him to go back to his car and curse his bad luck before going home to cancel his credit cards, but my father went back to his car and moved it until he was out of sight. Then he sat there waiting for three and a half hours. My mother finally called his cell phone to check on him. When the man finally came out, he looked around before walking to a car in the lot next door. My father sped over and blocked him in while he began to write down the license plate number. As he was doing this, the man jumped out of his car and came back to my father's. My father admitted this next part was stupid, and he could easily have been shot. The man said something he had to roll down his window to hear. He was asking my father what he thought he was doing. When my father told him he was writing down his tag number, the man said, “I'm sorry about your wallet, sir, but you can't do that. You're violating my civil liberties.”

My father said, “I suggest you watch me,” and rolled up his window.

By the time he returned home, the local Wal-Mart had called, and his wallet, without missing a thing, had been found on the floor there. He called the police nevertheless.

*   *   *

In the early fall of 2006, my father fell ill. His stubbornness had helped get him to where he was in life, but as he admitted himself, it could blind him. Stubbornness kept him from going to the doctor before he and my mother left on a trip for Italy. He'd sold his company, so he and my mother began traveling a good bit, to be able to deal with the leisure. He'd been complaining of stomach pains, to the point of almost getting himself checked out. He said after the trip that he knew he shouldn't have gone, but I understand why he did. Immediately on returning, after complaining to us about all the hills and stairs in Italy, he checked himself into the hospital. Two days and a battery of negative tests later, he was released. His pains didn't stop, however, so he went to see his internist, who couldn't find anything either, but urged my father to check himself back into the hospital.

When I got into town that night, my mother was just leaving to take him his toothbrush and a change of clothes. His stay was indefinite, at least until they found out why his stomach hurt. We were in the kitchen, and I told my mother not to worry about my dinner, I would just heat up some leftovers. Then I said, “The fatalistic way Dad's handling all this isn't going to help him. You even said yourself he's sure he has cancer. I told him he hasn't always been like this. He's basically being a pitiful, passive patient.”

My mother glared at me in disbelief. “But Clay, he's sixty-seven years old.”

“I know. All I'm saying is that he's one of the main reasons I've been able to recover at all. He hasn't always been this mentally pitiful. He's just waiting to die.”

She got that caged-animal look in her eye. I wasn't getting my viewpoint across, and she was getting angry. “But he's your father,” she said.

“That's not…”

“You could have a little compassion, you schmuck!”

I don't remember hearing the phone ring, but I was awoken at two o'clock the next morning and heard her talking on the phone across the hall. It was one of my father's nurses. My mother said, “Oh, my God!” He'd started throwing up blood, and they were taking him to the ICU. He was still lucid enough to have the nurse call home. I walked in to find my mother frantically getting dressed. My sister was on the way to pick her up. They would call and let me know what was going on as soon as they knew themselves. “Don't worry,” my mother added, opening her umbrella by the front door and stepping out into the pouring night, “it's all under control.”

We learned that polio can cause problems later in life for people who've had the disease when they were young. My father had always been in remarkably good health, apart from being overweight, and neither his family nor my mother's had any history of cancer. Were his years catching up to him?

They gave him an emergency endoscopy that night, hoping to find the source of his pain. The doctor had to put him to sleep for this, but my mother wanted Will and me to see him first, in case he didn't wake up. Her cell phone went straight to voice mail when I called to tell her to stop being so theatrical, and not to wait on us. Time was obviously of the essence. I called again and got the same result. I felt like I was back in the hospital, having another needless test that no one had ordered.

It turned out that my father's liver was failing. It had been for a long time. The diagnosis, cirrhosis, made me assume that alcohol had played a part, but as it turned out, this wasn't the case. My father did drink, but he wasn't an alcoholic. His unchecked diet and the curvature of his spine were factors, the doctors said.

His relief at not having cancer was short-lived. He needed a new liver, and soon. He began to turn yellow—not yellowish, but comical, face-paint yellow. They put him on a quarantined ward. Before entering, we had to put on gowns and masks and scrub up with antibacterial soap. A friend of ours, Will's best friend from elementary school, was doing a residency in the hospital at the time. He visited my father every day of the two weeks he was there. He told us later that if a new liver hadn't arrived when it did, my father would surely have died. “You don't think he could have made it another day?” I asked. He responded, “I don't think he could have made it more than a few hours.”

The color of my father's face went back to normal almost immediately after the transplant, but he remained certain that he was dying. Yet there was none of the expected fear in his eyes, of the kind that might prompt him to act, either to end it or to get better. We gathered around the bed, and he began writing out what he wanted to say. His throat being intubated for so long had left him unable, or too weak, to speak. Then he got tired and had me go through the alphabet letter by letter, while he spelled out his thoughts. He wanted to know the date. He wanted to say that his nurse was a bitch. That his back was hurting. As we were leaving, he tried to tell my mother something, which couldn't have been that important, because he didn't want to spell it out. He wanted to make us guess. He made a halfhearted effort to pantomime his thoughts, at one point folding his hands over his chest. When none of us could figure out what he was trying to say, he fell back on the pillow and shook his head in disgust, like we'd failed him.

I don't think he ever really gave the transplant a chance to take. He'd decided he didn't want to live anymore. Yet he was afraid to die. I didn't blame him—neither for the fear nor for no longer wanting to live. There was something intuitive between us. We understood each other, and he now trusted me. At the same time, I couldn't escape mixed feelings for having gained it this way. It had required his complete dependence on someone he knew could relate, whereas his instinct was to act for me.

The house became a theater of blame. For my mother and sister, it all came down to something one of the doctors was doing wrong. Will had two little girls by that time, and it was easiest for me to be involved. Once I drove downtown in the middle of the night, after my father had called home raging in frustration, demanding his street clothes. I arrived only to find him asleep. He called on Christmas morning to tell the family that it had been a good run. He ended up deciding he'd been having a nervous breakdown, and his doctors even sent the psychologist on staff to see him. I walked into his room while she was there, but he wanted to tell her all about me instead of discussing what was going on with him. She rolled her eyes after a while, and he looked at me and smiled before continuing. I explained to him that he could leave as soon as he was able to sit in a wheelchair for ten minutes. “But I can't,” he said. “I can't.”

“How do you know if you don't try?” I said.

It was like a fog moved in. He looked straight ahead, then he made his eyes roll back in his head, as if to blot out what was happening.

He died a few weeks later, after a prolonged refusal to eat. A machine was the only thing that kept his heart beating. His final moments were appropriately theatrical. A minister friend of his was there. We gathered around his bed in the ICU as they unplugged him, which was surreal because he was conscious, although intubated and groggy, as if he'd just woken up from a dream. His eyes were open. The doctor had said it would be just a matter of seconds before he flatlined, once he came off the cardiopulmonary pump, but he was lucid enough and had time to gesture first. He moved his hand. The minister beckoned us all to huddle up.

 

25

One day a few months later, after I'd moved from the lake to Shelby, I went to lunch with Caldwell's father, who I still saw fairly regularly. He wondered if I had ever considered teaching, at which I just laughed. He said he could really tell a difference in my voice and thought I could do it if I wanted. Then he told me about this experimental school downtown, where inner-city kids, most from single-parent families, from all over the area applied as a first step on their way to college—the school only went through the eighth grade. Charter schools hadn't yet come to Alabama, but that's essentially what this was. He had donated some money to the school, but wasn't involved otherwise. He said he'd love to take me to go meet the principal if this was something I might want. I could tell he had put some thought into this, so I said sure. The man we met with was the interim principal—the acting principal had stepped down the week before—and was an ex–army officer. Caldwell's father explained what he had in mind, that I teach or tutor some of the older kids in creative writing and help them with their papers. The principal agreed to it before Caldwell's father even finished, which automatically made me suspicious, but then we met with the volunteer coordinator and I felt better. (I couldn't remember the last time I'd had to fill out a background check, either.)

Right away, I realized I'd severely underestimated these kids. Even though I later discovered that the two girls I first taught were the best writers in the school, there was none of the lively discussion that I'd envisioned. This was beginning creative writing, for which they both had an intuitive feeling, but which they couldn't have talked about and I wasn't prepared to teach, and I was expected to talk the entire time. I didn't know what I was going to do. Not long after, I happened upon an exercise guide for college graduates that was divided up, loosely, by the different parts of a story. It saved me. I had to tailor some of the exercises for seventh- and eighth-grade level, but except for the ones dealing with sex, they all more or less worked. Plus, I couldn't give homework, so this seemed perfect. This was creative writing, after all. They would learn by doing it. I later found other exercises, as well as ones for poetry, and came up with some on my own, but that became the format—making them think for themselves in a framed setting—from then on. The biggest group I had was eight students, sometimes just one. We would do an exercise, then everyone would read what he or she had written and we, or I, would talk about how it could be better—only rarely did they actually rewrite.