There's a Man With a Gun Over There (11 page)

He never had a chance. He had barely recovered from the surgery when the cancer got him in its final grip. It squeezed the flesh right out of him. He must have lost a pound a day until, by early June, he looked like one of those who's barely survived a concentration camp. He was all bones and tendons and ligaments. His skin hung like a loose-fitting costume over the wires and pulleys of his skeletal system.

We all tried to hope, but the disease just took everything out of him. His head was just this skull with giant eyes on his scrawny body.

We decided to take care of him at home and moved a hospital bed into my bedroom, which had slightly more room than his. By July the cancer was painful, and the doctor showed me how to give him shots of morphine. Even with this instruction, I sometimes missed the vein and hit the bone in his skinny arm or leg, and he whimpered, his large eyes tearing up with love and pity and pain.

He leaned on me as we walked to the bathroom. I could feel his joints rubbing together in his diminished body. I fed him and bathed him and, every couple of days shaved him. Pretty soon, he didn't have the strength to walk, and I reached beneath his body and lifted him out of bed for his trips to the bathroom. He was light to carry. His body felt as though it were made of papier-mâché. The joints in his hips and knees looked huge next to his wasted legs and torso.

These were intimate moments; I'd never been so close to my father. I could have learned so much, but you know what?—I was embarrassed. He creeped me out. He frightened me. His breath smelled rotten, and his face was sunken because he'd quit wearing his tooth bridge. When I carried him, his limp body felt as though it were made out of rubber hoses. I looked at him in horror. I could hardly bear to touch him, afraid that this fierce disease would somehow rub off on me. Never, ever would
I
be like that, I vowed.

I wanted to be out with my friends drinking beer and howling at the night. I wanted to sit in parked cars with girls, kissing them and feeling their breasts flop loose from their brassieres. But no, I had chores. In the evening, when I got home from work, I had to take care of my dad, while my mother, exhausted from being with him all day, sat downstairs in the living room watching television and smoking and drinking coffee.

I sat inches away from my father's gaunt and yellowed face, pulling his razor through the lather on his sunken cheeks. At first we talked, but then he stared at me as if I were a stranger.

He was like a man slipping down the face of a mountain. I tried to stop his fall, but I could just feel his touch as he slid out of my hands, see the stunned terror in his eyes as he slid farther and farther away.

Every morning I drove off to the Chevrolet assembly plant, where I stood on a riser made of steel grating. I wore a heavy rubber apron and stiff, unwieldy rubber gloves and washed down the passing bodies of Chevy Biscaynes, Bel Airs, and Impalas with dry cleaning fluid so they'd be free of dirt and dust when they went into the spray-paint booth. One primergray-covered automobile body a minute jerked by on the squeaking and clanking assembly line.

Arch McConnell, my coworker, caught fire one afternoon. Or the naphtha fumes did. He stood there with his arms out in flames, the fire burning a few inches all around his body, fueled by the chemical fumes. He looked like the painting of Blake's
Glad Day.

“The fuck . . . the fuck . . . the fuck!” Arch screamed.

He wasn't burned. The fuel somehow protected him; the flames burned a few inches away from his skin and then simply went out.

At the end of my shift, I drove home, listening to WLS in Chicago, where the hit of the summer was “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones.

When my father's bowel movements turned black from internal hemorrhaging, we took him to the hospital. The cancer was now eating through his guts. Just before he died, he looked up at the crucifix on the wall of the Catholic hospital and announced, “That's Don Quixote.”

My father—incomprehensible as the coordinates he left in his surveyor's notebook—must have known something about Cervantes. And yet he hardly ever read and was not, as far as I knew, a literary man, and I have puzzled over his remark for years. It was so far from what he seemed to know and said so close to his death that his announcement seemed to contain knowledge from beyond the grave.

My father died on July 23rd, 1965, the day after my twentieth birthday. On one day, I left my teenage years behind and on the next I lost my father. The last sight I had of him he was a yellow-green corpse with a slight smile on his face, as if Don Quixote had finally told him the punch line to a joke.

“Daddy dead,” my brother said when we told him the next morning. “Daddy dead?”

As if he couldn't quite grasp what we were telling him.

Gary, my brother, died almost exactly a year later in 1966, as if he wanted to search for my father.

After we put my father's hospital bed in my room, I moved into his room. I hung my clothes in his closet and slept in his bed. I felt as though I was somehow impersonating him, trying to live in a space that was properly his.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I would quietly go there and try on his clothes, which were exactly my size. They didn't quite fit me, though. The wrinkles and the break points of the fabric were suited to his body, not mine, and the clothes hung on me with the memory of someone else.

The day after my father died, I was so depressed and anxious that I walked quietly upstairs, went into his room, closed the door, and lay on his bed. Even after a month of sleeping there, the smell of the bed, of the pillow, even of the room itself were foreign to me. I lay there that day, rubbing my genitals, and then began masturbating with a furious energy and suddenly was looking up through my tightly closed eyes at the heavens and in a hole between the clouds I could see the faces of the dead I knew—two of my four grandparents and my father. They stared at me, as if they'd opened up a manhole cover in the streets of heaven and now looked down at the subterranean world of the earth below and into the house at 863 East Memorial Drive, where I lay rubbing my cock.

I was so surprised that my left hand stopped its flurried up and down stroking. I let go, and my erect penis waved back and forth as if greeting them.

“Damn,” I said aloud, embarrassed, like a kid who's been caught. Then I got annoyed. I wasn't going to give up this therapeutic pleasure.

After a moment, I looked up at them in my dream.

“Get used to it,” I said. “Just go on and get used to it. You're going to see this every day I'm alive.”

The little halo of their faces vanished.

21.

I
n the fall of 1965, I went back to college covered by the gauzy folds of my grief. Jenny and I went on dates and held hands as we walked around campus, but I felt as though I was an actor in the staged version of Rick Ryan, reading someone else's lines. Only when Jenny sang some of the folk songs with the anguish of their terrible solitude did the inmost core of my soul reply.

Four strong winds that blow lonely . . .

I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way.

“What ever happened to Eurydice? Who remembers Eurydice?” a professor asked in one of my English literature classes. “The precious stone of her life lost, tumbling down and down. Lost. Irretrievably lost.”

One strange little bright spot that fall was the Student Talent Show. My God, were we ever so innocent that we put on
a talent
show? Is it possible, living as we did in the eddying streams of irony, that we could take a skinny white boy with an unbuttoned button-down shirt singing “Ol' Man River” seriously? Or how about the pale girl singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” her fingers grappling with the air in front of her as if she were turning knobs the audience couldn't see. Or maybe this was the beginning of irony—as we recognized how talentless most of us really were, maybe this was the moment when we decided to make fun of everything. Maybe this was the moment when irony became the only value.

But here came this mop-headed boy, his hair dark brown and his grin infectious, playing the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song, “The Lonely Bull,” bending into the notes as if looking for the air of his music in every nook of his body. What pleasure he got from our applause and look at how he spun the trumpet like a six-shooter and then blew across the mouthpiece. A gunfighter, finishing up after shooting. Grimes Poznik, the new gun in town.

22.

B
y the end of 1965, there were 184,000 American troops in Vietnam, and men were being drafted at the rate of 40,000 a month. But I didn't know any of that then. I don't think I was paying attention.

I don't think I'd recovered yet from the death of my father—maybe, in fact, I've never recovered. I remember walking around in a haze most of the time, only half hearing what my professors and my friends said.

Somewhere in that haze I heard myself asking Jenny to marry me. I thought she could save me from the iron loneliness of my life.

It was a sweet dream, our getting married was. We planned the date for the end of 1967, when, we were sure, the war in Vietnam would be over and the future would be filled with radiant possibilities.

“Are you kidding?” Steve Unger said. “The war's never going to end. It's getting more dangerous every day. I'm quitting school now so they can draft me. It'll be worse than ever in two years.”

“That's crazy.”

“What—you think you'll escape? We're all going in the army. I just want to get it over with. Get on with my life.”

The last I saw of Steve, he was slouched on a bench in the waiting room of the Greyhound Bus Terminal, cradling his guitar, strumming “It Ain't Me, Babe.”

Later, somebody heard that Steve was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Someone else said he was performing in a Boston coffeehouse. We also heard that he was a drifter—homeless and living on the streets in Minneapolis. He'd been seen wearing a thin nylon jacket in the middle of winter on a street corner begging, his hands shaking so badly he couldn't hold the change people gave him.