—
The afternoon of the detective’s call, Cara and I had been studying for a biology test. I had a huge crush on our professor, this swaggering Brit who would roar up to the science building on his Harley-Davidson and never took off his leather vest, not once the entire semester, while teaching us about eukaryotes and recombinant DNA. It was a lecture course that took place in this massive auditorium, which meant that we spent most of our afternoons fighting sleep in the nosebleeds while trying to discern scientific terms through a thick English accent. I was listening to Ani DiFranco (of course) on my headphones because Cara didn’t like to study with noise, but I couldn’t stay the hell awake unless I paired bio vocabulary with lyrics from “Hour Follows Hour.” Cara’s notes were better than mine, but I was better at drawing and labeling, so we often studied this way, back-to-back at our opposite desks, trading sheets of graph paper every few minutes. Cara tapped me gently on the shoulder and pointed toward the phone. I snatched my headphones off and ran to pick it up. It was Dr. Weiss.
Ira Weiss is an angel. I’m sure there are times he doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste or leaves only an inch of orange juice in the carton, but as far as real-life patron saints are concerned, that kind, soft-spoken gentleman was my father’s. Dr. Weiss had been SB’s cardiologist since the first of many heart attacks, in 1984. And my father, ravenous consumer of potted meat and salt pork, dormant volcanic mountain bubbling with an undercurrent of molten rage, enthusiastic guzzler of the corner store’s finest four-dollar champagnes, kept that dude in practice. You know what that asshole was doing when he lectured me about how my desire to enjoy a bag of microwaved popcorn was going to cause his heart to burst forth from his chest? EATING A POLISH SAUSAGE WHILE HIGH ON COCAINE. 147 arterial blockages (give or take) and my dude would still be like, “WHAT IS THIS? LETTUCE?” if I deigned to serve a salad alongside our grilled Spam in Tampico punch reduction or whatever slave food we used to eat every night.
—
Dr. Weiss is an orthodox Jew who keeps kosher and rides a bicycle everywhere he goes, and no matter how many times my father jumped gleefully from the wagon into a waist-deep river of cheap brandy and two-dollar steaks, Dr. Weiss would take him back, crack open his ribs, and scrape some more corrosion off the rotting meatfist in the center of his chest. The last time I had seen my father was the final day of my junior year of high school, when he moved me into the spare bedroom in the back of my sister Jane’s apartment. “Who’s gonna fold your sheets?” I called after him as he hobbled down the stairs. “Who’s gonna fry your smelts?!” He waved at me over his shoulder without looking back and disappeared. A few weeks later at church, I saw his old boss, the man who owned both the house we rented and the limousine SB leased to drive for work. I had never liked James; he laughed too loud and talked too much and dropped by our house unannounced too often. I do not like conspicuous men. And there he was, praising the Lord at the top of his lungs, shaking hands with people as they entered the vestibule. A sickening, oily smile spread across his face as he intercepted me. “Your father stole a lot of money from me before he left town, darling,” he growled through a phony smile. “A lot of money,” he reiterated, squeezing my shoulder as if a twenty-dollar bill was going to shoot out of it. Bile rose in my throat as I pulled away and slunk to a pew in the back of the church. I remembered running across a large plastic bottle, the kind used in an office water cooler, in the basement of the house one afternoon. It was filled with change, mostly quarters and dimes, and sometimes while cowering in the closet as Tropical Storm Samuel roared outside my bedroom, I daydreamed about rolling that thing to the bank and trading that laundry fortune for a train ticket to freedom. Of course he took it, I thought. I imagined him in the rickety Cadillac he’d bought before he left, bouncing down the highway back to Tennessee in a car filled with nickels.
—
Dr. Weiss informed me that after SB had suffered two heart attacks and a stroke (or two strokes and a heart attack), he had spent his own money to send for my father so he could be under his local care. He told me that things weren’t looking good, that my father (born in 1933 in Tunica, Mississippi) had survived poverty in the South and war in Korea and alcoholism in suburbia, yet refused to give his body a break for even a minute. He was drinking again and fighting again and not taking his prescribed medications again. I listened to the doctor, his voice soothing and calm, waiting anxiously for him to tell me what was going to happen next. And then my father was on the line, cheerful and gruff. He told me that he was feeling great, that Dr. Weiss had taken him on a skateboard tour of the morgue, and that everything inside was painted in psychedelic colors—it didn’t look anything like the cold, refrigerated vaults you see on television! Samantha, I am having so much fun! I didn’t cry, even though I felt like I should. “My father has gone crazy,” I mouthed across the room to Cara as I waited for the doctor to get back on the line. “You rode a skateboard through a room full of dead bodies?” I asked skeptically when Dr. Weiss finally returned to the phone. “Of course we didn’t. I’m afraid your father hasn’t recovered this time as well as we’d hoped he would.”
The evening of my birthday, I had gone down to dinner with some guy friends from my floor at five, but they both had girlfriends so there was no watching Braveheart on a continuous loop the way we usually spent our Saturday nights. Cara had gone home for the weekend. I had a stack of Jane magazines and a handful of birthday cards that needed responses, but then my sisters called, two of them on one line, and I braced myself for an explosion of off-key birthday singing. “SB is dead,” Janie said. “They found him in someone’s yard earlier today. I’m so sorry, pumpkin.”
Here are the things that I know:
1. My father was placed in a nursing home a couple of days after I spoke to him. Coincidentally, his nursing home was down the street from the one my mother was in.
2. On February 12, 1998, he decided to go for a walk. Without a coat or socks, and several days after surviving some ratio of heart attacks to strokes that I am still not clear on because sometimes the details just get away from you.
3. SB visited my mom and swindled $10 from her roommate. He’d always had a way with the ladies. Even half-dead, he was totally charming.
4. He was missing for two days.
5. They found him three miles from the nursing home. Cause of death: hypothermia.