Chump Change (3 page)

T
WENTY MINUTES PAST
S
UNSET
B
OULEVARD, WE TURNED OFF
the Coast Highway onto Heathercliff Road. The personalized license plate on the Benz convertible in front of us read, “SE ME WIN.” I knew I was home.

When we pulled into the driveway we could see that the house was completely dark. Fab said Mom was at the hospital with my sister and my sister’s husband, Benny Roth.

I got out to open the big iron gate and flipped the latch and pushed it open a few feet, less than wide enough to admit Fab’s station wagon.

A rusty hinge creaked in the darkness. A kind of low groan. Something within made me restrain myself from opening it all the way.

Then a second later, I knew why. In the distance I heard growling and the moonlight revealed a hairy white torpedo of a dog coming around the corner. It was my father’s pride and
joy, his husky fourteen-year-old bull terrier, Rocco. What Jake La Motta had been to middleweight fighters, Rocco was once to other dogs. As he got closer I could see his limp, and the ancient, jagged scars covering his face. Dried rivers of pain from a hundred wars.

His head bore the marks of the population growth of our family’s neighborhood. Like the rings of age in the center of a tree, each scar corresponded with the new arrival of a Doberman, a rottweiler, a German shepherd or a Great Dane. He’d fought them all as their masters built homes and eventually made the error of letting their dogs pass the perimeter of my father’s driveway. Rocco’s face was the record.

The dog got to within a couple of feet of me, then stopped and stood his ground. He was checking me out. I waited. He wasn’t growling any more, so I tentatively reached out to pet him.

Rocco grabbed my sleeved arm playfully, like a Kung-Fu master demonstrating a lethal thrust to an eight-year-old. Then he let it go. I allowed him complete control.

Aggie and I got inside and unpacked in the bedroom that had once belonged to Fabrizio and me. There were still two double beds in the room. Not joined. Agnes was content with the sleeping arrangements.

Fab wanted to know if I was going to return to the hospital with him that night to be with the old man. I did not want to go and my kid brother, knowing that I’d just come out of a treatment facility and trying not to pressure me, gave me the option of staying at the house. I didn’t want to see the old man. Not yet. Rather than be with me, Agnes decided to
accompany my brother to the hospital. I would have the house to myself.

After they’d gone, I went into the kitchen to check the liquor supply. There was a counter-top full of whiskey and vodka bottles. I poured myself a glass and walked out on the cliff to smoke and drink with the night. The ghosts of dead dogs and the whispering of my old man’s voice in my head kept me company.

One hundred feet below, I could make out a waveless beach in the moonlight and feel the dry breeze of a Santa Ana wind moving in from the east.

I was sure that I didn’t belong here, and I recognized that the familiarity of that feeling repeated my sensation of strangeness and separateness, one I always had in the hospital treatment center. It was the same experience I had been having in my own apartment with my wife. I understood that I had become uncomfortable with all of my life,
everywhere.

It was surely part of the reason that my drinking had gotten out of control. Knowing that information made me further realize that I had come to completely not give a shit about anything. The Jack Daniels and the wine took the edge off that truth. It was why I was unwilling to quit.

The smell of the ocean was everywhere, as I stood on the cliff looking out. Nothing was really different here, except everything. It all looked the same, except it had all changed.

In the morning Agnes was asleep and I found a note from Fabrizio. She and my brother had returned after midnight from the hospital, then he had gone home to Santa Monica.

The note said that the old man was worse, being kept alive by a drug that made his kidneys function, but pneumonia had set in. Our mother had spent the night with him at the ICU. Jonathan Dante would not live another day.

I had been up since before dawn, sweating and smoking cigarettes, roaming the large empty house with the peopleless rooms. When the daylight came, I was standing at the kitchen sink making coffee, looking north out the window. In the half-light of day I could see that there was even more new construction. The housing depression of the nineties had avoided Point Dume. Squinting to see further down the road, I recognized where a large gully and a creek bed with boulders and jagged rock formations had once existed. It was gone. Covered over. A green-mirrored house on stilts was in its place. Expensive.

In the bathroom I puked, showered, and continued to add fingers of whiskey to my coffee until some of my trembling went away. It bothered me that my shakes had returned so soon after going almost a month of detoxing without a drink. When I’d soothed the tremors enough, I managed to reset my watch. I’d slept a total of two hours.

As I was shaving, I heard Fab arrive and enter the house through the door to the back porch. He called, “Anybody home,” but I didn’t answer. The eyes that I saw looking back at me in the bathroom mirror were those of a dog loose on the freeway.

We drank coffee together standing in the kitchen. He wanted to know what had happened to me. Why had I landed in the nut ward? He was a very intense guy, and his directness came from a fear that what I had, might be inherited by him too.

I had not planned to be crazy, I said. Arrests for lewd practices in public were things that happened when I drank. I’d not planned on being a degenerate. Life got away from me. Out of hand. I couldn’t figure it out either.

But I was his brother and he wanted to know why I let other men suck my dick. I could tell that he’d decided that I was irresponsible and selfish and that my problems stemmed from a lack of self-discipline. I drank too much and I let myself rum amuck. That was my problem.

We talked about him too. Fab was proud that he had put himself through college and into grad school mostly from working in a super-market. When the old man had gotten sick and his only income had been his Social Security and Writers Guild Pension, my brother had paid for his education by himself. At one store, working his way up from box boy to checker to assistant manager. Union wages. Vacations. Dental benefits. Six years at USC. The CPA exam.

I convinced Fab to let Agnes sleep while he and I drove to Cedars. He knew Aggie and I weren’t getting along. For days he had been dutifully shuttling back and forth from Malibu to Santa Monica to get my sister, then back to the hospital in his Country Squire. Running errands for our mother, picking up medicine. Coping with the old man’s condition by staying busy. As we backed out of the driveway and pointed the car toward L.A., he passed me his watch. It was digital and had a stop-watch function.

He wanted me to help him time our drive. It was a sort of game. To keep himself interested and occupied during his trips to the hospital, he timed each of his runs.

So when Fab said “GO,” I pressed the black button on the side of the watch and we peeled out.

While we drove, he wanted to tell me about his lifestyle. How he’d gotten the MBA through hard work and determination. It was a lecture on how I personally could be more responsible. I put the window down and smoked and watched the digits of his stopwatch speeding in a mechanical frenzy while he yacked on about himself.

Fitness was a primary factor for Fab. A positive mental attitude was important also. “What we think about is who we are.”

Furthermore, he explained what had caused our father’s health to fail. The perils of too much salt and fat and cholesterol. Stress. And piss-poor financial planning.

Fab reminded me that Dante had squandered hundreds of thousands during the many years he had worked as a screen-writer in L.A. It was harsh, but he had to admit that the old man was a careless, selfish fool. He whispered these words and shook his head sadly.

To Fab, the solutions were clear then, just as they were today. Dante should have bought property. He’d be rich. Trust deeds alone could have assured a comfortable retirement. Now, on his death bed, to my brother’s shock, Mom had disclosed that the old man had made no provisions for his heirs whatever. There was no will.

Fifteen minutes into the ride, I felt myself getting sick to my stomach. The self-righteous crap coming from him was forcing a pool of bile to collect at the bottom of my throat. I was sweating, soaking through the back of my shirt. Completely out of patience.

Each judgmental, pissy remark and criticism about our father made me want to grab handfuls of his hair out by the roots. Each sound, each resonating shit-filled emission of his speaking increased my edginess.

For a minute, I was distracted as we passed the La Costa area, where the scars of the last big fire had not yet healed. I could see that everything on the hills had been obliterated. Denise Jacobson, a junior high school friend, had bought a house there after college and a divorce. It had been destroyed.

Stumps of other expensive homes stood like seared head-stone reminders of the equality of cataclysm. Saigon must have looked like this after it was overrun. South Central L.A. God doled out pain with impersonal indifference.

By the time we got to the Topanga area on the Coast Highway, I could take Fabrizio no more. “Let’s pull in at the market,” I blurted, interrupting his monologue. “I need cigarettes.”

“No stopping,” said my brother. “I’m in a hurry. I know what you want.”

“You think you know. But you don’t know. You know nothing.”

“You want more booze. No stopping.”

“I’m talking to you now in a non-aggressive way. This is important. It is the best that I can do. I want you to understand something; sometimes I get impatient. It’s like a disorder…I need you to stop the car NOW!”

He sneered. “I know your disorder, Bruno. You can pick up your whiskey later.”

“Stop the fucking car!” I yelled, smashing my fists over and over into the dashboard. “Pull the-fuck-over!”

“We’re supposed to be at the hospital.”

While holding Fab’s watch in my teeth, I tore the plastic bands from each side of the dial and spit them on the floorboard of the car. Then I threw the watch at the windshield.

“Pull over, motherfucker!”

“What’s the problem now, Bruno?”

“Cockshit! I’ll crush your eyeballs out your asshole.”

Watching me, my expression, he turned the station wagon into the store’s parking lot and stopped. “Look at you,” he said, shutting the engine off. “Look what you’re doing. Are you crazy? What’s the matter?”

“Shut up!” I yelled again. Trembling. “I need you to shut your fucking fuck face!”

He was scared, but he removed what remained of the damaged watch from the polished dashboard, saw it was still efficiently timing the ride, then hit the stop button to temporarily halt his elapsed time. “Okay. Calm down,” he whispered. “What now? What do we do now?”

I got out of the car, walked a step or two, then hunched down and began puking between Fab’s car and a Volvo parked in the next slot.

Fabrizio came around the front of his wagon. “Can I get you something for your stomach?”

I was still puking. “Move away.”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“Don’t talk. No speaking.”

He waited, watching me retch. When I was done, he spoke again. “Would a drink help? Do you want me to get you a bottle of something?”

“Yes. You can do that,” I said, still tasting the sourness in my mouth. “Get me a pint of Ten High.”

“You’re upset about Dad, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I recommend that you talk about it.”

“Get me the bottle, Fabrizio. We can share ourselves fully some other time.”

I
HAD NEVER BEEN TO
C
EDARS
M
EDICAL
C
ENTER.
I
T WAS
enormous, with levels and levels of parking. Montifiore in New York was small by comparison. This was a sickness mall. A gleaming cash register of a hospital.

Inside, through two sets of double-doors and long linoleum halls, the hospital was like every other hospital. The smell was the same. Fab was a quick, impatient walker, always staying busy, always running some compulsive mental contest. I kept up with him until the idea of seeing the old man and the odor of the place made my stomach ripple again.

When we passed a men’s room, I stopped and called to Fabrizio to go ahead without me. He paused, shot me a backward glance, making a face that seemed to say that he didn’t care what I did. He was satisfied that he’d gotten me there. Before he went on, he called out our father’s room number over his shoulder.

Inside the first bathroom stall, I bolted myself in and sat down to take a piss. But I did not piss. I clenched my eyes closed as long as I could, breathing in and out.

I felt my heart slowing, so I blew my nose and lit a cigarette, then flushed the crapper.

The bathroom was not a main hospital crapper. It was a kind of employee john, so I hoped that I would have a few minutes of privacy.

I sat there for a while. Thinking. Letting myself relax. From time to time, I sipped at the pint bottle in my coat pocket. I lit more cigarettes.

There was no graffiti or writing on the blue walls of the stall and everything was clean and new-looking. When the bottle was gone, I counted the smoked butts floating in the toilet. There were four. Three of them had little brown streams drifting downward in the toilet water. They were grouped together and were about the same length, smoked the way I always smoked, to just above the filter.

The fourth was a nonconformist. Longer. I watched it bobbing alone. Then I stood up and directed my stream of piss on it. It failed to break. My stream wasn’t strong enough. I was getting old.

The main door to the bathroom clicked open and I heard my brother’s voice. “Bruno?” he whispered.

“What?” I said back.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“Go away, Fabrizio.”

“Are you coming?”

“In a few minutes.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m preparing. I’m okay.”

“You’ve been smoking in here. In a hospital. There are rules about not smoking.”

“Fuck you, nurse.”

“Rules. That’s all I’m saying.”

“How’s the old man?”

“Still alive. His lungs are filled with fluid. He’s not good.”

“You go on back. I’ll be along.”

“When?…Mom wants to know. She wants to see you. We’re all in the waiting room. What do I say?”

“I don’t care what you say.”

“How soon are you coming?”

“When I’m done here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Go away.”

My sister Margaret was the first person I saw when I got to the waiting room. Maggie. Then my mother. Then Benny Roth, Maggie’s husband.

Maggie jumped up and hugged me. My little sister. She was five years older than Fabrizio (Tommy) and seven years younger than me. She had new tits, done since I had seen her last. She hugged and kissed me, then made a face like I had an odor.

I hugged Mom. She smiled too. She seemed glad to see me. Benny Roth shook my hand.

I sat down and Mom told me in greater detail what I knew already. She had gone in to wake up the old man in the
morning four days before and had been unable to get him to open his eyes. He was groggy and not making sense, so she called old Dr. Macklin, who had had my father immediately transported to the hospital by ambulance.

Macklin, my father’s doctor for twenty-five years, to be sure about his diagnosis, had called in Dr. Helmut. Helmut was not really a complete expert and not 100% sure in these cases, so he had called in Dr. Stein. Stein was the final authority.

After two days of needles and fluid samples, monitors and many expensive tests that further traumatized my father’s body, everybody agreed unanimously, without a doubt, Jonathan Dante would die.

I’d been in the ICU waiting room only a few minutes when a jittery, high-strung transvestite calling himself Copacabana made his own entrance. He was wearing black stretch pants and a fitted top that came to just below his rib cage.

Copa joined Dwight, a straight-looking college-type young guy who’d been watching TV. They sat on the couch across the room, opposite the one my mother, sister and Benny Roth sat on.

Cedars is only a few blocks from Hollywood, and it made sense that many emergency OD’s and drive-by shooting casualties would show up there, instead of going to hospitals in L.A. that were further away. I didn’t give a shit what misadventure had occurred to bring Copa and Dwight there, it just pissed me off to have to tolerate them. Copacabana was whacked on something that impelled his body to get up frequently and change the TV channel. When he wasn’t
talking, he’d suddenly lurch to his feet and hurry across the room. He would then look around defiantly at everybody, adjust his tank top or cinch up his tights, dial the set wildly in one direction, then back the other way. He seemed to prefer sitcom reruns. After he’d found a program, he’d return to the couch, laugh crazily at things that weren’t funny, get bored quickly, then do the same thing again.

Copa’s roommate and lover, Paris France, had eaten a bottle of Percoset and choked-down several mouthfuls of drain cleaner because the day before, Copa had admitted he was in a new relationship. It was Dwight that discovered Paris France on the kitchen floor.

I was embarrassed by their conversation about the suicide attempt. My family knew that I knew about insanity and self-killing. They also all knew that, concealed under the sleeves of my shirt on my wrists, were six deep scars with stitch marks. Razor tracks. The recent sutures from the operation after my stomach mutilation with a steak knife were not yet healed. I hoped they didn’t know about them. But, as Dwight and Copa talked more about the details of Paris France’s attempt, I could sense the eyes of my family on me. I realized then that Agnes must have filled them in.

We were allowed back in to my father’s bedside after a final try to revive his kidneys had failed. We formed two groups: Mom and Maggie and Benny Roth would go first, then after they returned, Fab and I would be allowed in to say our last goodbye.

Loving Jonathan Dante had not been an easy thing for anyone to do. I was sure his intense pride would have
prevented him from conceding to have anything other than a doctor or a priest at his deathbed. I didn’t want to see him there, alone, his power gone, without hope. I didn’t want to see him at all.

When Fab and I entered his room, I realized how unprepared I had been. My eyes confronted a blind, legless torso and my brain was unable to accept the input of my senses. I did not recognize the shriveled half-person that was now my father.

Diabetes had hacked off his toes, then his feet and legs, then caused complete blindness over the last five years. I knew these facts. I’d been told everything in phone calls. Now I was seeing.

I went to the bed and picked up one of the hands. The fingers were short and thick. Hammer handles. I recalled those fingers. I remembered once thinking Michelangelo must have had fingers and hands like these. My father’s stubbed fists had fashioned priceless words that had spilled from his typewriter on to acres and piles of paper that had created an extraordinary river of honesty and pain that became Jonathan Dante’s work. Dante novels. Now the river was dry. I bent my head and put one of the hands to my cheek, hoping to say something to this ghost. But no words came.

Instead, I could hear his breath, thick and congested, coming in gasps. I knew that he could not hear me, that his brave heart would stop soon, and he would die, never knowing I had stood there at all. Finally, before I could set the hand down, I heard myself say, “I love you.” Saying the words, what I felt was something like sorrow, but it was not sorrow, it was far deeper. It was the emptiness of a hole that would never be filled.