I move along slowly with the heavy burlap sack hooked to my belt. Every foot length I push a hole in the moist earth with my staff, drop in a seed potato and stomp it down. It’s like sliding eggs under a brooding hen.
I give up. It keeps him happy and gives him something to do. I have more time for myself. I begin doing my Yoga while he’s fooling with the bed. I’m already fitting into Mom’s routine.
Two years ago she saw me doing Yoga and went into a whole drama about it being a heathen Hindu religion and I could be excommunicated. She wanted me to confess to a priest. After that, visiting them, I carried on as a closet Yogi.
But Dad’s dressing himself. With the help of his cards he’s finding his own clothes, getting washed and generally taking care. He comes out for some ham and eggs. I give him his bearclaw, too. I turn on the music. He does the breakfast dishes and kitchen, using his card, while I do the sweeping and general picking up. With only the two of us there’s practically nothing to do. I scrub out the bathroom sink and tub with Ajax, then scour the toilet bowl.
I show Dad how to put his dirty underwear, shirts and socks in the bathroom hamper and where to hang his slacks. He even learns how to look in that bottom drawer for his sweaters.
The next trip to the hospital, he directs me all the way. He’s beginning to enjoy his newfound capacity to participate. He even asks questions about what it’s like living in Paris and how Jacky’s doing in school.
Mother’s groggy. I don’t know whether they’ve medicated her or if this is the normal aftermath of a heart attack. I have an appointment with her doctor, Dr. Coe.
I leave Dad with Mom, and go downstairs to Coe’s office. He’s a young fellow, considerate and reasonable. He gives me a rundown on what’s happened to Mother; shows me cardiograms and points out significant details. Apparently an arteriosclerotic condition has caused an occlusion and insufficient blood is reaching her heart. It’s a question of how much damage was done and how well the heart can compensate. If it gets desperate, they might try a bypass, but at her age it isn’t recommended. He feels bed rest with a medical approach is best.
He reiterates how it’s all a dangerous and treacherous business.
I’m impressed with Coe but depressed about Mom’s condition. I go back to her room and she’s more awake. I tell her how I’ve talked to her doctor, seen all the cardiograms. She’s distinctly had a heart attack, there’s no way around it. I tell her she’ll be fine if she only follows the doctor’s advice. She just must relax, take it easy; she’s worked too hard all her life anyway.
Her eyes moisten; she’s working up her “fight back at all costs” look.
“But how can I relax, Jacky? How can I possibly take care of your father? You know how he is.”
“Don’t worry. We’re working things out. Dad’ll be able to take over when you come home. He made his own bed this morning and washed the dishes. I’m teaching him to cook. He’s watering the garden and keeping the lawn up. It’ll all work out fine.”
Now she’s crying, crying mad.
“Don’t tell me. You’ll go back to your beatnik life and Joan’s too busy with her own family. King Kong, the big-shot wop, will never let her come over more than once a week. He won’t even let her phone me, even though I pay so she can phone free. I know, don’t kid me!”
I wait it out. Dad leans forward. He’s suffering seeing Mother cry; she doesn’t cry all that much.
“Honest, Bette, you’ll see. I’m really trying; I’ll get on top of this. Don’t you worry; we’ll make out OK.”
Pause of three seconds.
“How long do you think it’ll be before you come home, Bette?”
It’s not so much the question as the plaintive note in his voice. Mother shoots me one of the looks through tears.
“Don’t worry, Dad! It’ll be a while yet. The doctor will tell us when she’s ready. It costs over two hundred dollars a day keeping Mom in this intensive care unit and they don’t hold people here any longer than they need to. When her heart’s settled down and is working better, they’ll move her to another part of the hospital, then home. We’ll set up our own private little hospital for her right there in the side bedroom.”
Mother’s crying again.
“I’d rather be dead than live like this. You mean all my life I’m going to be a cripple, a burden to everybody? It’s not fair. It’s not fair this should happen to me of all people. I’ve always taken care of myself, exercised, eaten a balanced diet with vitamins; everything, and all for nothing. It’s not fair.”
This is so true. It’s never been any fun eating at our house. As kids, when we sat down to eat there’d be three vegetables with each meal. Not only that, we had to drink the pot liquor from those vegetables. I dreaded meals: string-bean juice, spinach juice, pea juice, carrot juice; we’d sit down and they’d be there, each in a separate glass. No matter what you did: salt, pepper, catsup; it all tasted like dishwater. Mother’d savor these juices as if they were the elixir of life; she was a big fan of Bernarr Macfadden. Dad never touched the stuff, and when Grandpop or Uncle Harry lived with us, they got off, too; but Joan and I were stuck.
Then, every morning, we had to slug down cod-liver oil. I think if old Bernarr said cow pee was good for you, vitamin P, she’d run around behind cows with a cup. When we complained too much about the cod-liver oil, she got a brand with mint in it, like oily chewing gum. She’d hide it in orange juice, fat, minty globules of oil floating on top.
Also there was brewer’s yeast. We had to take a slug of that every morning; the taste of rotted leaves and mold. This was supposed to have some other kind of vitamins in it. Mother knew about vitamins before they invented them. She ran her life, and ours, along the “live forever” line. She was years ahead of her time. Now, with all the health food stores and health freaks, she’s actually more a hippy than I’ll ever be.
She’s right, it isn’t fair. She’ll never accept. I know. Right now, in her mind, she’s figuring some way to lick this heart attack. And it doesn’t involve lying around in bed; that’s for damned sure. I can see her inventing some crazy exercise for the heart. It’s wonderful she has that kind of gumption but this time it can do her in.
Dad and I get home in time for the soap operas. I go into the garden back room and collapse; the strain’s catching up with me. When I wake, I make more detailed lists for Dad. I break down a few jobs like cleaning the bathroom and defrosting the refrigerator.
When the soaps are over, Dad takes me out to his greenhouse. He’s a great one for starting plants from tiny cuttings, especially plants that don’t flower. He has an enormous variety of fancy, many-colored leaf plants. He has Popsicle sticks stuck beside each one with the Latin name, the date and place he found it.
It’s a genuine jungle. Dad’s always pinching cuttings of leaves or twigs from every interesting bush or plant he gets near. In Hawaii he must’ve snitched a hundred bits and pieces. He packed them in his suitcase with wet towels. I’m sure Mother wasn’t too enthusiastic but there’s no stopping him here. Then, somehow, he manages to grow plants from these tiny snips, sometimes only a leaf or a bit of stem.
He’s rigged a unique sprinkler system in the greenhouse to give a fine spray. It’s tied into a humidity gauge so it turns on automatically, keeping the place jungle fresh. It even smells like a jungle; you almost expect to hear parrots or monkeys screeching in the top branches of his creeping vines. Dad spends a fair part of his free time in the greenhouse. He’s more at home there than in the house.
Staking tomato plants, spindly, soft-haired, long-legged, easily bent or broken. Heavy with dark leaves, blossoms and new rounding fruit. The strong green pungent smell surrounds me. I carefully lift and catch each sprawling branch, turning it gently to the warming sun, a joining of earth to sky.
In the outside garden, Dad has avocado trees, three different varieties, so they almost always have avocados. There’s a lemon tree and what he calls his fruit-salad tree. This is a peach tree but
he’s grafted onto it nectarine and apricot branches. The tree bears all these fruits simultaneously; it looks like something from Hieronymus Bosch.
He also runs a small vegetable garden, with Swiss chard, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, carrots; easy crops. Dad keeps this garden just for fun, says all those things are cheaper to buy than to grow but he gets a kick bringing homegrown vegetables into the kitchen.
After dinner, Marty calls. She’s just come back from her gynecologist and knows she’s pregnant. They’ve been trying for two years and she’s so excited she can hardly tell me. I’m ecstatic! I’m going to be a grandfather! I put Dad on the line so she can tell him, too. He holds the phone out from his ear, listens, grins and nods his head. He doesn’t say anything more than grunts of pleasure and uh-huhs but he’s smiling his head off. Tears well up in his eyes, then run down the outside of his cheeks. It must be great for him being a potential great-grandfather, to know it’s going on some more.
We put the phone down and look at each other. We’re both smiling away and wiping tears. It’s a big moment, too deep for us to even talk about.
Dad gets up and turns on the TV, but I don’t feel like watching Merv Griffin pretend he’s talking to us. I’m itching to move; I want to work off my swelling restlessness.
“Come on, Dad; let’s go out and celebrate!”
“What do you mean, out, Johnny?”
“I know a place, Dad. It’s down in Venice and it’s called the Oar House. Let’s go there.”
“What! The what?”
I say it clearly and laugh.
“The Oar House, Dad: oar, 0—A—R.”
The Santa Monica chamber of commerce made such a fuss they took down the sign. There’s only a giant pair of crossed oars over the door now.
This place has wall-to-wall stereo vibrating like a discotheque but with a terrific selection of music; music from the twenties to Country Western, rock and electronic moanings. They sell a pitcher of beer for a dollar and a half with all the popcorn and peanuts you can eat. There’s a barrel filled with roasted peanuts in the shell and an ongoing popcorn machine. A guy could probably live on beer, popcorn and peanuts, plenty of protein, carbohydrates, and corn’s a vegetable.
But the best thing is the walls and ceilings. They’re covered with planned graffiti, and plastered, hung, decorated with the strangest collection of weird objects imaginable. There are Franklin stoves, bobsleds, giant dolls, bicycles, broken clocks, automobile parts. Everything’s painted psychedelic colors.
On Friday and Saturday nights, people dance mostly barefoot. The floors are an inch thick with sawdust so it smells like a circus: sweat, peanuts and sawdust. The light is pinkish and constantly changing. It’s the kind of place I like, a good non-pressure feeling; run-down Victorian; an English pub gone pop. There’s something of an old Western bar, too.
So we drive down; it’s near the beach about ten minutes from my folks’ house. Dad stops in the doorway and looks around.
“My goodness, Johnny, these people are crazy. Look at that.”
He points. There’s a doll hanging from the ceiling upside down without any hair and somebody painted her blue. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, Dad, it’s only decoration.”
I pick up a pitcher of dark beer and two cold frosted mugs at the bar. I steer Dad to my favorite booth in back, perfectly located for the sound system. In this spot you feel the sound’s coming right out of your head. I get handfuls of popcorn and peanuts, spread them on the table. The tabletop has a laminated picture of a girl in a very tempting pose. I hadn’t noticed that before. I’m seeing things differently, like going to a zoo with a child.
We look out at the mob. There’s a fair amount of pushing and flirting going on; strictly a jeans-and-sweat-shirt crowd. You’re supposed to be twenty-one to get into this place and they’re strict, but the girls look young. Then again, almost any woman under forty looks like a child to me these days.
Dad’s watching all this. He hardly remembers to drink his beer.
“Gosh, Johnny; this is better than Fayes Theatre in Philadelphia, back in the old days.”
He swings his head around and laughs. He has a way of putting his hand over his mouth when he laughs, covering his teeth. Both Dad and I have separated front teeth; I mean a significant separation, about half a tooth wide. Dad’s incredibly sensitive about this. His father had it too, and I’m obstinate, or vain enough, to be proud of mine. I feel it’s a mark of the male line in our family. Still, neither Billy nor Jacky has it; Marty did, cost a small fortune in orthodontics bills. I even like separated teeth in women, but you can’t ask a girl to keep something like that if she doesn’t want to.
Dad’s so embarrassed by his parted teeth he’ll never smile or laugh without putting his hand over his mouth; so he’s sitting there snickering behind his hand.
We drink our beer slowly, listen to the music and watch the action for about an hour. We get home by ten. We’re both tired and manage somehow to climb into bed without turning on the TV.
The next day things start fine. I hear Dad back there fumbling around dressing, making his bed. I do my Yoga and sweep. By nine o’clock he’s out. He even finds his own medicine, then sits down for a big breakfast with me. All his movements are stepped up by about half. He’s sitting straighter, eating faster. I remember how when Dad was young he used to wolf his food; I wonder if he’ll go back to that.
We even have a reasonable breakfast conversation. We talk about painting. Years ago, I gave Dad a box of paints. There was everything he’d need, including two middle-sized canvases.
So Dad took up painting and did some of the most god-awful paintings I’ve ever seen. He framed them for Mom and they’re hung in the bedrooms.
One trouble is Dad didn’t use the canvases I’d left. He said he was saving them; saving them for his great masterpiece, I guess. He went out and bought canvas board, crappy cotton canvas stretched over and glued to cardboard. These were all of about six inches by nine inches each. Dad sees paintings as handmade, hand-colored photographs. So he paints paintings the size of photographs. He paints from photographs, too. Nothing I say can get him to paint from nature or from his imagination. He wants something there he can measure.
He did one painting of an Indian weaving on a vertical loom in the middle of a desert; all this on a canvas not bigger than a five-by-seven photograph. Dad is probably the twentieth-century master of the three-haired brush. This Indian picture is an outstanding example of eye-hand coordination; but it’s a perfectly lousy painting.
He’s also done two paintings by the numbers. This is right up his line. The paintings are a reasonable size, maybe twelve by eighteen inches. One is The Sacred Heart, the other The Blessed Mother. He framed these, too; they’re hung in the side bedroom beside the bed where I’m sleeping. Again, he’s done an absolutely perfect job, perfect color matching, and he’s stayed completely inside the lines. These two could be used as models for a paint-by-the-number set.
But this morning at breakfast he tells me his painting career is finished. It turns out he’s tried painting one of the San Fernando missions. For him it’s a grand affair, practically a mural, fifteen by twenty-four inches. I hope for a minute he’s really gone out to San Fernando but it’s another photograph. He shows me this photo; has it squared off in coordinates. It’s a terrible picture to try painting. I’m not sure I could make a composition from this mess myself. There’s a clump of foreground bush, then about half the photo is empty California sky. Between the bush and sky is squeezed a yellowish adobe building, cornered at an angle to the plane of the photo. Worse yet, there are arches running across the near side of the building. It’s practically uncomposable, an arrowlike thrust from left foreground to right rear.
Dad tells me how he’s had one devilish time with those arches. The composition doesn’t worry him but those arches drove him crazy. Perspective is a mystery to him.
After dishes, we go out back and he
shows me his painting. It’s hidden so Mother won’t see it. It’s a muddy mess with great green globs in the foreground.
I do a little drawing on it, showing him how to correct the arches and rough in a perspective idea, but it’s impossible to make any kind of painting from such a piss-poor photograph. Painting from photographs is never a good idea anyway; cameras have cycloptic vision, the dynamics of bioptic human vision is lost.
I’m dying to write Vron and tell her about the baby but I’m sure Marty wants to do this herself; it’s her baby; I’m having a hard time restraining myself.
Dad goes into his greenhouse. He sure spends a lot of time out there.
Soil’s just right now, soft enough so the spade sinks to the shaft but not muddy. New dirt opening up, shining where the metal’s pressed tight against it.
We visit Mother and tell her Marty’s news. Mom takes it easily, as if she’d been expecting it. Maybe when you’re almost dying, being born isn’t such a big deal. She might even be feeling pushed.
When we come back, I’m still restless so I go back and work some more on my motorcycle. When I’m finished, I get an impulse to take Dad for a ride. It’d be fun rolling slowly down to Venice beach. I think the sensation of riding might help brush away some cobwebs.
We happen to have two old helmets here. I search them out of the garage. Dad’s watching me.
“How about it, Dad? How about a slow ride on my motorcycle down to the ocean; it’s a fine afternoon; let’s go watch the sunset.”
He stares at the bike.
“I don’t know about that; it looks scary to me.”
“If you get scared, we won’t go. Let’s try it around the block here one time to see how you like it.”
I help strap the extra helmet on him. I don’t know why he looks so out of it, not like a motorcycle rider, more like Charles Lindbergh in one of those old leather aviation hats. Also, the helmet makes his head lean forward as if it’s too heavy for his neck.
I straddle the bike and kick down the foot pegs. I show him how to get on. I tell him to put his arms around me and hold tight.