Suburban Renewal (14 page)

“It crossed my mind,” he admitted. “If ever there was a time to get out that razor strop, this was it. But I managed to stay cool, not take it personally.”

“Your own son makes a personal attack and you don't take it personally?”

“He's a kid,” Sam said. “He was angry and kids say things, especially when they know they're in the wrong and they're cornered.”

“I can't believe you're taking this all so well.”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “Well, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't seem like such a big deal.”

“What do you mean?”

Sam picked up a glass of wine and handed it to me. “Your brother's T-cell count is down to forty,” he said softly. “And the banker called. They've decided to auction the house. We have to be out by the end of the month.”

He picked up his own glass and raised it to mine in a toast.

“To better days than this one,” he said.

1991

T
he world was moving, changing, things were happening. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union was breaking apart. A despot named Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. American soldiers had gone there to fight a war.

The price of oil was finally back on the way up, though domestic production was not really rebounding. Tulsa was going in new directions. The little town of Lumkee was now inseparably linked with the city's path. New industry, a new technological economy had arrived. Most of the men in town had found work or were back in school. A change for Tulsa meant changes for us. In fact, local developers wanted to rename the town. Lumkee sounded so unappealing, they argued. Why would high-tech, upwardly mobile families want to move into a town with such a
yesterday
name? They proposed changing the official name of Lumkee Township to Eagle's Bluff.

“It's aesthetic, it's suburban, it's now,” Mayor Dixon explained. “And it's not really a change. It's merely an Americanization of the name we now have.”

Lumkee, being the Muscogee language word for
eagle,
had been a community, a tribal town since the re
moval of the Creek Nation from the Deep South. The name came from the river bluff just north of town, which had once been a prime nesting spot for the birds. Eagles had recently been reintroduced to the habitat and were now a tourist draw for enthusiasts with binoculars.

The mayor, backed by a long line of identically suited real estate hopefuls, supported the amendment to the town charter.

Harjo Peeples, an old, frail leader of the few members of the tribe still left in town, was opposed. Doing away with the Creek place name was, to Harjo, equal to throwing away the town's history. Miss Pruitt at the public library was equally incensed. Slowly all the people began to take sides.

Citizens for a New Century is what the pro-name-change forces called themselves. Let Me Live in Lumkee the signs of the traditionalists proclaimed.

I was sitting on the sidelines, watching.

Not that I wasn't busy.

When we'd been evicted from the house we'd been forced to split the family temporarily. Corrie and Lauren moved in with her parents. That was wonderful for Edna. It was a great diversion for her to be forced to devote more time to the life of a thirteen-year-old who loved shopping and gossip. And it was good for Corrie, too. At least she wasn't still working two jobs. An opening had come up in the university's Early Childhood Education Center, and with the excellent references she had from the north-side Head Start, the human resources department was happy to allow her to transfer. She'd become so accustomed to her rigorous schedule that she'd decided she could study full-time taking night classes. She was now more than halfway
to graduation. The luxury of having her mother to come home to at night didn't seem like a bad thing.

Nate moved in with Cherry Dale and Floyd. I was opposed to this. Corrie was opposed to this. I think even Cherry Dale and her kids were opposed to it. But when Nate and his paw-paw decided on something, it was very hard to stand against them. And it made sense in some kind of way. Floyd had gotten a job as the custodian at the high school. Of course, it wasn't really the high school anymore. When the local school district had consolidated with Tulsa Public Schools, the high school where Corrie and I graduated was turned into a middle school, where the kids attended. A new huge high school complex was being constructed outside of town where Lumkee kids would attend along with teenagers from the nearby suburban housing developments.

With Floyd working at Nate's school, it was easy for him to see that Nate was there every day and on time.

The fact that Lauren attended the same school and walked to class didn't seem to enter into the equation.

I was living at Mike's house. His health had steadily worsened over the last two and a half years. He was no longer able to care for himself. Since I was the one who didn't have a job, it was reasonable that I was the one who should stay with him.

He still had days when he felt good. Sometimes the doctor would order an IV of what the nurses jokingly called “Immune System in a Bottle.” It would perk him up for a few days and he'd want to see friends, drive down Main Street, visit the drugstore.

The last I tried to discourage. Not because his presence cast a pall upon the Maynards' loyal customers,
which it did. But because I didn't want him to see how bad business had become.

With big discount stores out near the expressway offering cut-rate prescription service while you shopped for clothes, wastebaskets and power mowers, Maynard Drug, a fixture on Lumkee's Main Street since 1947, was about to go under.

Even sadder than that was the fact that Doc Maynard didn't seem to care. This fine, gentle man who was shouldering most of the financial burden for all of us, had lost heart. He had seen the battle before him and was too war-weary to fight it. I think the only reason he didn't just put a For Sale sign on the front door was that he didn't want Mike to see it. His son's death was inevitable. And I was pretty sure that when the business closed for the funeral, it would never reopen again.

But I could only worry about that on Mike's good days. On his bad days, I only had time and energy to worry about him.

I would help him bathe and dress. He wanted to walk to the living room and eat in the dining room for as long as he could. He knew that his life would most likely end in bed, so he wanted to spend as little time there as possible.

He wasn't crazy about watching TV. But he loved movies, especially obscure art movies. So I would rent videos, dozens at a time, and he would watch them for hours.

Mike had always been an avid reader. But his sight began to fail. We got him new glasses, but the eyestrain problem was caused by his tear ducts malfunctioning—not keeping his eyes wet enough.

So I read to him.

I had, since being unemployed, discovered the thrill of thrillers. I regularly borrowed the latest from the public library.

But what Mike read was different. He was interested in science and history and philosophy. Subjects I knew almost nothing about. But you don't have to understand in order to read. And, amazingly, as you read, eventually you begin to understand.

Sometimes we would even discuss the books. One day while I was reading an essay by Emerson, Mike stopped me in midsentence.

“Do you believe that?” he asked.

I glanced down at the page I was on.

“Compensation?”

Mike nodded. “Yes, do you believe that? That somehow over a lifetime all the good things and bad things that happen equal out.”

I looked down at his frail body and pale face, blemished with ugly skin cancers.

“I don't know,” I told him honestly.

“I think it does,” Mike told me. “Over the whole lifetime, I think it does.”

But what if you don't get a whole lifetime? I wanted to ask him. Could there ever be any compensation for that?

I guess it could be said that some of Mike's pain was compensated by the fun he had with his friends. After a lifetime of being a closet homosexual in a small conservative town, Mike had suddenly been “outed,” and now his friends from Tulsa showed up in Lumkee to visit. What the town might have thought of that, I don't know. But they were an interesting group. I'd never had any dealings with gay men in my life. And my inclination was just to treat them as if they were straight.
That mostly worked. But some of them were so…girly…that it just felt more natural to talk to them like women. So I just went with that.

For the most part, I didn't know what they thought of me. I assumed I stood out as the straight guy. But apparently not. One evening when the house was literally crowded with people, I was fixing drinks in the kitchen when Josh, a big, beefy cowboy type asked me if I was Mike's partner. I think my jaw must have dropped to the floor, I was too surprised by the question to answer.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, they are not lovers,” Daryl, a close friend of Mike's, told the guy. “He and Mike are brothers.”

I regained my composure enough that I could have pointed out that Mike was actually my brother-in-law. But somehow I felt no need to make the correction.

Local people dropped by from time to time as well. The pastor, some of Mom's friends, occasionally somebody Mike knew from the Chamber of Commerce or the Optimists Club.

Surprisingly the most faithful visitor was Cherry Dale. They had been friends for years. She would come and talk to him. Tell him the stupidest jokes and entertain him with all the gossip from the gym. It was on one of those days when I heard more things than I expected.

I'd been in and out of the house doing the lawn. I'd come in the kitchen door and had sat down at the breakfast nook. I hadn't meant to eavesdrop, it just happened.

Mike was saying, “So I want you to know that the money I've loaned you all gets wiped out in the will.
You'll own the gym free and clear and nobody will be able to touch it.”

“Mike, I don't know why you've always been so good to me,” Cherry Dale answered.

He laughed. “You're the only girl who ever volunteered to cure me.”

She laughed. “I'm
so
embarrassed. What an idiot you must have thought I was.”

“I didn't think you were an idiot,” Mike said. “I thought you were a nice person who was attracted to me and didn't understand why I wasn't attracted back. You know, you're the only person in this town that knew I was gay. I never trusted anyone else.”

“I can't believe you trusted me,” Cherry Dale said.

“Well, I was right. You never told anyone.”

“I told Floyd,” she said. “Probably the worst person in town. That's who I told.”

“I don't blame you for that,” Mike said. “Floyd…well Floyd is like your personal brand of AIDS. He's a painful, sickening source of misery in your life. A plague that you never wanted but can't blame anyone else for.”

“And something I'll probably die of,” she added.

She said it as a joke. There were always lots of jokes. But there was nothing funny about Mike's battle with AIDS.

He took more medication than we had room for on the kitchen counter. He counted them once.

“One hundred and fourteen per month,” Mike told me. “As a pharmacist, I expected to count a building full of pills in a lifetime. I just didn't think I'd be expected to swallow them.”

Some days, swallowing was the biggest challenge he could face.

It was easy to tell why the Africans called AIDS Slim Disease. Mike's weight went down to 134 pounds. On his wide-shouldered, six-foot-two frame, he was like a walking skeleton.

I was determined to feed him to try to keep up his strength. He never felt much like eating. Part of that was fatigue, he was just too tired to make the effort. The medicines altered his ability to taste anything. And his mouth was full of thrush, a yeast infection that actually made eating painful.

I had never been all that spectacular in the kitchen. I wasn't even one of those guys who liked to throw steaks on the grill. But when you can see the flesh falling off another person's body, well, you just know that you've to do more than heat up a can of soup and grill a cheese sandwich in the toaster.

I began trying to fix healthy, tasty meals. I talked to Edna and Corrie. I tried to recall some of the special things that Gram had sometimes cooked for me. I borrowed recipe books from the library.

Mike cheered my efforts, though often he didn't eat much of them. I knew I was getting better when everybody seemed to be interested in my leftovers. Even Nate, on his compulsory one-afternoon-a-week visit, spent most of his time raiding the fridge.

On a cold autumn day I stood in the kitchen surrounded by cookbooks, trying to think of something special. It needed to be fairly soft, Mike could hardly chew. Meat loaf? No, that was too bland. It needed to be a little bit spicy, so he could taste it. Spaghetti? Too messy. He'd never be able to feed himself that and it was so demeaning when I fed him. Then, from far in the back of my brain, I remembered a warm spring day, a beautiful wife and a hotel on the move.

Tamales? Tamales.

My mouth watered as I thought of the taste that I remembered.

I went through all the cookbooks looking for a recipe. I couldn't find one. Finally I called Miss Pruitt at the library.

“I'll see what I can find,” she told me, and, true to her nature, she called me back in twenty minutes.

There were lots of different recipes. I went by and got copies of them all and sort of scrambled them together in a workable way. Several of the ingredients were not in my cabinets. Masa flour.
Hojas. Anchos.

I didn't try to fix them that day. But the idea was born. I called around to specialized groceries until I found one that had masa flour and
anchos
and that promised to get me some
hojas.
The next time I took Mike to the doctor we stopped by and got the stuff.

“You're going to have to help me with this,” I warned him. “Tamales are not a one-person creation.”

He agreed to help. I made up the tamale filling by itself a day early. Then I helped Mike get comfortable in the breakfast nook. I mixed the masa flour and spices with the lard. I used warm beef broth to keep it all from gumming together in a big glob. It had to be cohesive enough to hold together without being so sticky it stayed on our hands.

We'd just started experimenting with the masa paste, smearing it on the corn-shuck hojas. Corrie, Edna and Lauren showed up to help us. We all sat around the table together trying to do it. When all else failed, I read the directions aloud.

“Tear down a wet
hoja
to the width of your hand. Place it in your palm making sure the smooth side is
facing up and the tapered end is pointing in the same direction as your fingertip.”