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Lines

12/31/2018

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Lacy Jordan - Diary entry 12-26-2018
 
   Home safely. Damn, what a long, energy sapping, soul-sucking drive! Traffic on the Grapevine was straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Worse than that was the trip home itself. I hate it. It’s no wonder that I only make it twice a year. The dust and clutter in dad’s house is bad, but the sediments of his battle with depression fills me with the deepest sadness, second only to the sadness I felt when mom died.
 
   We had grown closer in the last phases of her illness, and it was truly heartbreaking for her to pass on without that last touching of the fingertips. I was reaching across the chasm, and she was reaching back, but those last few feet of distance remains, and will remain with me until I die. I hope you don’t take such memories into the grave for both my mom’s sake and my own.
 
  Dad, on the other hand, is always there to touch. It’s a different kind of anxiety with him as it seems that he is already partially in the grave. In the beginning, after mom left me, my dad, and my brother Brenden, Dad tried to go venture out on his own and start up a new life, but he eventually got tired of it and one day went and got a shovel out of the tool shed and started digging a grave.
 
   Now that it’s been dug (metaphorically, at least), it’s like he has taken off his shoes and started dangling his feet inside of the hole to test the waters so to speak. When I reach for his hand, it is always with the attention of pulling him to his feet, shaking him briskly, and then making him put his damn shoes back on. I wished he realized just how hard for it is for me to take his hand and to peer into that void behind his eyes.
 
   He’s also taken to reading the Russians, and I think that this is a bad sign. Them guys are serious as heart attack. They should have a warning printed on the covers that reading them might lead to “ Seriously doubting the purpose of existence.” Dad even told me that Tolstoy had to hide things like guns and ropes from himself for fear that might trigger him to commit suicide.
 
   Yeah, like I want my Dad to be reading that shit! I keep telling him to get his head out of those fucking books long enough to see a therapist, but he just argues that his reading is his therapy. I shouted back at him, “Dostoevsky needed a fucking therapist too!”

   He just looks at me with that stupid grin of his and shouts back, "Yeah, but if he had seen a therapist, he would have only written the Twilight series." Then later when he noticed I wasn't laughing, he would say softly, "I know, I'm trying....I'll try harder. I know I have to do better."

   SMFH.
 
  Who else has to talk to their dad like that?
 
   I have always thought of him as being a wise man, but lately, He's been more of a wise ass. I want him to come back to life, to emerge butterfly like and open up colorful wings. My brother and I need him to be stronger.
 
   Ironically, that was what my mom needed too.
 
 Peter Jordan- thoughts while driving 12/27/2018
 
  I know I worry the kids, and I wish it wasn’t this way. Lacy told me I need to get therapy again, and I know she’s probably right, but I also know that I will probably never do it. I don’t completely understand why, I just know it probably ain’t going to happen.
 
   I figure it has something to do with knowing that the human race has gotten by for thousands of years without it. Life just went on with paths and actions determined by lessons learned. I really don’t know if we are actually in a better place because of all the progress and advances we have supposedly made.  Life sucks a lot and knowing the hidden causes of why it sucks a lot doesn’t magically make it un-suck.
 
   There is also something inside of me that stubbornly insists the key is in perseverance and learning how to live from the mistakes you make in living. I mean I learned at an early age that it’s a big mistake to mix beer and wine. Seems trivial, but I no longer mix beer and wine. Add enough of these little life lessons together and they add up, and they are no longer trivial; they change behavior and help determine future action.

   When you get older the lessons become a lot more important, a lot harder, and a lot more expensive. It's no longer a free education. The student loan comes due, and you have to pay up front for future courses. You'll say, "OK, I'm fine right here with my high school diploma," but you are not. Besides every level of old age requires an advanced degree. You either continue with your education, or you die prematurely.
 
   My dad lost his home, his mom, and his sister at an early age, but he always laughed, and he made people around him smile. My grandfather was placed on trial for the murder of a man who showed up and testified on the last day of the trial. He lost everything he had built because of a false accusation.  My mom said he was one of the nicest men she ever met.
 
  They didn’t learn to laugh and be kind by going to therapy. They learned because life had reached out, grabbed them by their collars, and literally slapped the living shit right of them. Before they did anything else, they had to learn to get over that initial Slap-down, and then once they got back on their feet, they got slapped down again. Life is a slapper downer, and it doesn't seem to like people being excessively happy.
 
   They also learned that they only had two choices, to stand there sniveling and wiping the snot from their noses with their sleeves while their hearts hardened into stone, or to stand and defy gravity every step of the fucking way. It’s an insane choice, utterly devoid of reason, yet it seems to be the only choice that can put a smile on your face despite the often immense sadness of being.
 
  You don’t go to therapy to learn to defy reason. I know that many people need therapy because they have fallen hard and are incapable of standing back up without help. It’s just not for me. At least, not yet.
 
  This is also what every great author, philosopher, or religious leader has ever said. Persevere! Stand up in the face of the fact that life has been designed to suck a lot. Evidently there is something that we need to learn from the situation. I mean like whatever it is, it’s gotta be worth more than picking up a few scientific tricks on learning how to deal with shit.
 
   The Bible says that God sent Abraham on a three-day journey to Mt. Moriah. That’s a long time to stare into the abyss, an even longer time to contemplate on the anguish that he faced. Three days! They make my last three years look like child’s play. I just need a little time to get back my feet under me. I just prefer reading to pretty much everything else, that is except eating.  I like to eat.

   I still have a lot of hope. The world doesn’t become a true hell until all hope is lost and hope, by its very nature, is always around somewhere. You might have to look under a rock sometimes, or peer into a dark closet, but it’s there hidden. You might find an old seashell tucked away in a box that reminds you of a day you once spent at the beach, and when you put it to your ear, you see yourself in a mirror and laugh.
 
  I wish though, for my children’s sake, my house wasn’t as dusty and my coffee table wasn't all covered with books; I wish my mind wasn’t so cluttered, and that I didn't have such a need to know what life is all about.

  I wish that I was a master chef whose specialty was blending just the right amounts of material ingredients with the perfect dash of the spiritual . I wish that I could build a house from scratch and turn lead into gold. I wish I could play the lead guitar on Pride and Joy and sing the solo on Bohemian Rhapsody all while laying down new hardwood floors in the kitchen. 

I also wish, for my children’s sake, that I was a lot stronger.  Ironically, it’s the same thing I wished for my wife’s sake too.

Brendan- email to Lacy - 12/31/2018

  Damn Lacy, he makes me so mad sometimes. On Christmas Eve, I found a picture of mom. She had written on the back of it that the cure for homosexuality is ceaseless prayer. I posted it on Facebook with some angry remarks about so-called Christians and their hateful beliefs, and Dad saw it. He asked me politely to take it down. We argued. He defended Mom as usual.
  He was in his "be a bridge mode", and it made me angry. Told him that sometimes I just need to shout. He said that it was okay to shout, just do it quietly. I yelled that he needs to shout too. He smiled and said, "I do." I hate it when he tries to go all Buddha on me.
   Brad and I finally picked a date. It's going to be San Diego in June. Dad said he would be there. Sorry I didn't tell you Christmas, but I was mad that Brad had to go to his home without me.
                                                                                 Love #1

Peter Jordan - Journal writing from 1/1/2019

Today's Reading:  War and Peace (pgs. 532-556), Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (pgs.-100-127)

Thoughts on Reading:   Damn, Natasha dodged a bullet. No thanks to her own actions. I wonder what The Dude was trying to say there. It had me sweating like a school girl watching The Hunger Games.  The Wolfe book stirred up some old memories, and I went to sleep a little  agitated.

Personal Thoughts:   I'm going to try writing in this journal that Lacy gave me for Christmas. She seems to think it will help me get stuff out in the open and force me to deal with whatever's troubling me. I'll try it for awhile; can't hurt I guess.
   I don't know why they're all in hurry for me to be over grieving. Lacy seems to think that I have been fighting depression for over 12 years. I think she's got the wrong diagnosis. I was hurt when her mom left, and I had gotten over a lot of it, the family break-up and starting over part. Then Jenny died right after my dad died. I am grieving still. Grief is not a thing you rush. I tried that with Dad, and it came back on me. Hell, it's been two years, and I've barely gone back to using the road that runs by the cemetery.
   Lacey's frustrated with me, and Brenden's marrying Brad. God keep them safe and allow them as much happiness as they can have without making the Olympians jealous.
   I only wish...

 

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Heart Strings

12/24/2018

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   The audience roared. They always did. They were all drunk of course, stupendously, gloriously drunk.  Champagne flowed freely at the Rue de Namur, the swanky, hidden night club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  Manette, the female puppet in the act, would ask, “What do they call a paraplegic trying to swim.”
 
   Then the Great Gustave, self-proclaimed world’s greatest marionette artist, would subtly pull on one of Little Billy’s strings so that the puppet would demurely utter, “Bob.” The audience would roar. By the time, Gustave took the stage, the audience was usually well into a drunken reverie where jokes making fun of the handicapped, the poor, the crippled, and the outcast seemed hilarious.
 
   It was quite a macabre scene with all the ladies and gents dressed in all their finery but starting to fray a bit at the edges with a diamond tiara out of kilter here, a strand of gray hair sticking out there, a wet spot or two on a tuxedo vest.  The showroom was dark with only the stage lights and a few wall mounted lamps for illumination.  The red velvet lined walls cast the whole room in eerie, diabolical hellish glow. The alcohol-fueled conversations were far too loud as was the laughter.  These were people who were tired, tired of life, tired of rules, tired of genteel behavior.
 
   From that point on, the jokes got ever more outrageous and risqué, and the act usually ended, as it did this night, with the Great Gustave getting a standing ovation as he exited the stage headed straight to the bar with Fat Mary, his traveling companion who was also the ventriloquist who handled the female puppet Manette. They left their assistant Lillie behind to pack the marionettes and transport them to the van outside.
 
    Lillie, a twenty-five-year-old Honduran immigrant, loved the marionettes and would carefully wipe them off before she placed them back into their cases. They reminded her of the two children Manuela and Jimmy that she had left back home in Honduras.
 
   A young beauty with luminous brown eyes and long black hair, she had made the mistake of walking outside her village just as the local drug kingpin was driving by.  He had her husband Carlos murdered at a local soccer game and then quickly made his intentions known as a suitor.
 
   It was hard decision, a heart wrenching decision, but she left her children with her widowed aunt and her grandmother and made her way North.  The plan was to work and save, buy a house, and then send for the children, but each day made it easier to drown in the oblivion of what her life had become.
 
   She had been working as a dishwasher at the Rio Plato restaurant in Brooklyn when she had made the chance connection with the Great Gustave.  He had stormed into the kitchen complaining about the quality of the food when he locked eyes on Lillie up to her elbows in suds. He offered her a job on the spot. 

  She might have rejected the offer had it not been for the fact that he offered twice what she was making washing dishes. Lillie knew she was taking a risk but acted on the simplest of arithmetic, more money equals less time away from her children.
 
  At night, she would often caress and polish the marionettes and untangle their strings while whispering soft phrases in her broken English as if she were exorcizing away the evil of the words that Gustave and Maria had forced them to speak on the stage.
 
   One time Gustave had overheard her, and he became enraged.  His large brown eyes nearly bugged out of his head and his thick red lips glistened in the light of a single overhead bulb. “Who are you to criticize my act you ungrateful cunt!” he had screamed with flecks of spit spraying Lillie. “It pays your wages, you stupid bitch. If it wasn’t for me you would be still be washing dishes at that cheap restaurant in Brooklyn. From now on, you are forbidden to talk to the marionettes. Do you hear me? Put dem in dere cases and no more talk!”
 
   Trembling, Lillie apologized profusely. She still talked to the marionettes but quietly and only in secret. Sometimes though, when she knew for certain that Gustave would gone for a great while, she would take them out and enact little vignettes about love complete with dancing, singing, and kissing.
 
   The act itself kept getting increasingly vulgar. The more Gustave drank, and he drank quite often, the more it would spur his sinister, depraved creativity. The more cynical and depraved the act became, the more popular and in demand it became. One night in Chicago, the standing patrons of O’Meara’s began to shower the stage with $100 bills. Gustave and Fat Mary drank well into the morning after that show.
 
   It was quite a sight, Gustave with his arms outstretched accepting the worshipping crowd, Fat Mary behind him with tiny line of sweat on upper lip wanting to push him aside but knowing better. Gustave secretly hated them all; he despised the rich.
 
They made him think of all the people his mom had cleaned houses for over the years. He remembered the stories about how the rich men she had worked for tried to take advantage of the young maid. He thought of the hand me down clothing that the matrons had given his mother, and he remembered his mother bent with arthritis dying before her time. It made him happy to think that his act was contributing to their moral ruin and ultimate decay.
 
  Gustave’s real name was Avidis. When he was younger, it was his mother who had sent him to study in a nearby seminary. It was there that he met a crippled young priest named Johan, a wood carver, who had taught Avidis how to carve out marionettes. Every week the priest would go into a village and train young people on how to carve wood, and Avidis would often accompany him.
 
  One day, Avidis saw the young daughter of a local merchant peeking out from the window of her father’s cobblers shop. Her name was Anusha and she was tall and lithe and had thick curly golden hair and large green eyes. Later, Anusha would help Avidis put on puppet shows for the younger village children. 
 
   And what shows they were, stories about heroes and young maidens, mythological monsters, and stories from the Bible. The village children loved them and would beg their mama’s to let them forego their chores and run into the village square where they would sit with their companions and giggle and sing and shout. Avidis and Anusha would come on Saturday mornings regularly as clockwork and find their audience already assembled.
 
  And then one day, he went to collect Anusha, and as he passed under the vine covered trellis that led to her cottage he saw that everyone at her house was crying. Her distant cousin Aram, who was staying with her family for a few weeks, had choked the life from her for refusing his drunken advances. The cousin had just returned from France where he had made a fortune in the import business. Aram had offered to take Anusha back to France and employ her in his business. Her mother had turned the offer down as she regarded her daughter as too young.
 
   That night, he had returned from a night of heavy drinking and gambling with some friends. He quietly crept into Anusha’s room, fell down upon his knees beside her bed, earnestly professed his love and tried to kiss her. As she pushed him away, she laughed. It was the laugh, he said later, that caused him to put her hands around her neck and squeeze.

  Aram had a lot of money and was able to grease a few wheels and beat the charges in court. Three years later, Avidis was standing at a crossroads where one road led into the village and the other road led into another small village.  A car drove by slowly and then stopped. A window was rolled down and Avidis saw the face of Aram looking out at him before the window closed again. 
 
  When Gustave stood before the members of the audience while basking in the glow of their adoration, he always envisioned them as corpses. This was what he was really thinking when he smiled and bowed. It aroused him. Then he would have to satisfy his lust with a visit to Fat Mary’s room. He tried to force his way upon Lillie once, but she had punched him in the nose.  He decided that he would bide her time with her.
 
   When Gustave and Fat Mary returned to their lodgings on the night of the hundred-dollar shower, a huge row broke out over who deserved the greater share of the bills.  Gustave had only given Fat Mary two of the hundred dollar notes and that after he had crawled off of her in her bed. He headed for the bedroom door to escape her wrath, and she jumped out of bed as quickly as a jungle cat and followed, carrying the argument into the front room where Lillie was sleeping on a dusty old sofa.
 
    At the end of the argument, Gustave had thrown a large, leather bound book at Fat Mary, and the book had struck the corner of her eye making a small red mark. Fat Mary picked up a heavy, half filled brandy glass and dumped the contents over Gustave. She then broke the glass by hurling it against the wall.
 
   She ran to a table, picked up the case with Manette, grabbed her coat, and scurried out of the room before the stunned Gustave had a chance to react. Realizing what would happen without her part of the act, he drunkenly lurched out of the room in  pursuit.
 
    Lillie noticed then that Little Billy had been taken from his case and was lying in a jumbled mess in corner of the room. She hurried to pick the puppet up and untangle its strings. She was carefully wiping off its face when the enraged and frustrated Gustave returned. A hideous look of anger distorted his fleshy face.
 
    “Wha I tell you about dat?”
 
    “About what?” she answered confused.
 
   “ About filling my puppets wit dat baby talk.”
 
   “ I was just wiping the brandy from his face.”
 
   “Da brandy?”
 
   “Yes. She must have got some on him when she spilled the drink.”
 
   Gustave didn’t reply immediately but threw himself down into an easy chair and sat there brooding for a while. A tense minute later he finally mumbled, “ She’s gone. I gotta write her out of the act. Just me an Billy from now on.”
 
   He slid back into his thoughts for a while before he noticed that Lilly was still standing there. “ I thought I told you to put that Goddamn puppet away.”
 
  “ I was going to, but I noticed that his face was wet again.” She wiped the puppet’s face again and sat it gently back into the blue velvet of the case.
 
  “You creep me out da way you do dat.”
 
 “Do what?”
 
  “ The way you handle them so gently as if dey are little children.”
 
 “ It’s just respect, signor. As you say, it is how I make my living.”
 
 “ Well, no more. When we get back to New York, I am going to find a new partner. I might as well find a new assistant too.”
 
  Lillie wanted to cry but did not want to give Monsieur Gustave the pleasure of seeing the tears. She silently closed the clasps of the puppet’s carrying case and slowly left the room.
 
  The next morning, a matronly hotel maid with a bad limp unlocked the red door to room 409 and carefully dragged her vacuum cleaner behind her.  She went back into the hallway and got two clean towels and hand towel. She reentered the room and started screaming at the top of her lungs.
 
     Mr. Gustave was lying on the bed in pool of his own blood. A pair of large scissors had been plunged deep into his throat.  His purple tongue filled his mouth hole, and his lifeless eyes bulged in silent terror. Lilly was nowhere to be found having checked out early that morning.

   When the police came to investigate, their thorough search found nothing with which to incriminate a suspect. The pile of hundred dollar bills was on table next to the bed. Gustave's grandfather’s gold watch, the one his mother had smuggled out of Turkey, was clutched in his right hand. There were no fingerprints on the scissors or the puppet.

   There was nothing else out of the ordinary, except for the marionette Little Billy. Strangely, the puppet’s strings had been cut and were lying on the blue velvet lining of the opened case, all except one string.That string had been used to fashion the noose which had been tied around the puppet's neck and from which Little Billy was found hanging from a coat hook on the back of the closet door of the hotel room.

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​Chapter 11                Free Falling

12/13/2018

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I don’t believe that people ever really hit bottom and bounce back up; I think it’s more that we just get use to falling.  The post-marriage experiences that I have so far related were isolated moments.  Such moments of excitement in my life were really few and far between. Life after Jennie left me was, for the most part, a life of meaningless repetition and mind numbing boredom. I woke up in the morning, went to work, came home, and went to sleep at night.
 
I was also pretty depressed and wouldn’t own up to it.  People have the wrong idea about depression. They associate it with people who have totally lost their way, people who are suicidal, schizophrenic, homeless, or addicted to drugs.  Depression is actually everywhere.
 
Depressed people look normal. They go about their life without attracting too much attention to themselves. They lose track of time and are apathetic about doing the simplest of things.  I would do something like drop a sock the floor by the sofa and not pick it up for days and sometimes even weeks or get suddenly surprised by the arrival of an event I had known about for months.
 
I was shopping at a Wal-Mart in Belle Vista, and it dawned on me just how many of the people around me were suffering from depression. It was like being surrounded by zombies. I was packing an extra thirty pounds that I had gained since Jenny had left, and I suddenly found myself surrounded by other obese people, many of them wearing clothing that obese people should not be allowed to wear in public.
 
I had just finished reading a book by a Nobel Prize winning professor of bio-genetics who argued that human DNA is hardwired for humans to be their best.  A thought bubble appeared over my head with the words, “That’s the meaning of life then. We are here to learn how to be our best.” To me, it made perfect sense and explained a lot, but it forced me to also consider why weren’t more people trying to be the all that they could be?
 
And I suddenly realized that the reason we don’t always try to be our best is that most of us suffer from so many traumatic life experiences that we don’t even realize that we have been damaged.  We have repressed a lot of memories of traumatic experiences that bubble up and manifest themselves in our lives in ways of which we are mainly unaware.
 
For a while, I became somewhat of a hermit. I didn’t want to go outside and be around people. I preferred sitting home in the dark with my own gloomy thoughts for company. I started wearing short-sleeved shirts to work, the kind with the squared tail that you didn’t have to tuck inside your pants. This made me look even fatter than I was, but I didn’t really care. The only one who said anything was Jonesy. She would tell me, “Damn, Laz, that shirt makes you look like a blimp.”
 
I pretended that things were going to be great. I allowed myself to believe that dating would somehow magically heal the pain.  Since that first day that Jennie left me, I have never felt the urge to date.
 
I had a hard time sleeping. One night I almost lost it completely. I had driven to Las Vegas on a whim. I had spent the day drinking and gambling. When it came time to sleep, I couldn’t. I started imagining that I couldn’t breathe if I laid my head down. There us nothing so ugly as wanting to sleep and not being able to sleep. I didn’t want to do anything but sleep. The idea of going back down to the casino floor did not appeal to me at all. It was a nasty feeling trying to figure out what would make the ugliness go away. I would have driven the six hours home if I hadn’t drunk so much.
 
Finally, I had go downstairs and go outside and walk around for a while. Being out in the night air calmed me down some. I had some earplugs on and walked around listening to Miles do his thing. When I went back upstairs, I sat in a chair listening to music and trying to control my anxiety by regulated breathing. It worked. I finally fell asleep about three in the morning.
 
I arrived at work one day shortly after the Vegas trip, and there were two plastic bags sitting on my desk. I looked in one and it contained a razor and some shaving cream. I looked in the other to see a gray long-sleeved dress shirt and a narrow blue tie.  I looked over at Jonesy who was on the phone. She arched her eyebrows, daring me to say anything.
 
The next day I came to work wearing a shirt and tie and have done so every day since. I also shaved the full beard that I had worn since my college days and shaped it into goatee. They were small gestures I admit, but they were the first real steps that I took back to the land of the living.
 
I had a friend who coached basketball at a local junior college. He and I had coached high school together when I worked for Jennie’s dad. We were good. We had won five straight league championships before I got a promotion and had to give the coaching up.  Roy kept calling me and inviting me out, and one day I accepted an invitation to a family barbecue at his house. Around midnight, after drinking a six-pack and several shots of tequila, I agreed to help him coach. I didn’t really have the time to coach, but I made the time, and suddenly I was too busy to think about Jenny Delamore and how badly I had fucked up my life.
 
Things lightened up a bit. I was going to games and attending practices. I started hanging out with other coaches and started building up a new life to replace my old life.
 
Then one May, I attended a coaching clinic in Las Vegas with Roy and some other friends. We had a great time, but I returned home to find my mom in the hospital. She had suffered a heart attack. It was Mother’s Day.
 
Mom had a pace maker installed and recovered, but she had to stay in the hospital for a couple of days. My dad stayed home alone for the first time in sixty-nine years. I don’t know if it was the fear that caused it, but something inside of him snapped. He was never the same. By the time that Mom came home, he was showing the signs of dementia.
 
He didn’t want to leave his house ever and would constantly fuss with the front door lock. He would get up in the middle of the night and insist that my mom go watch television with him. He had been fastidious in his cleanliness but suddenly quit bathing. He had a hardy appetite but quit eating. He was gentle, funny and kind but turned bitter and angry. He began to wet the bed at night.
 
He lost his hearing aids and it cost over two thousand dollars to replace them. I made the decision to take him to the Veteran’s clinic, so my mom didn’t have to pay out of pocket for them. It was the worse decision I ever made because in the four months we went there, he never any received treatment for whatever it was that finally killed him. They were still running tests on him when he died.
 
I had fought with his doctors from the first appointment to get my dad a colonoscopy.  I had to go to the archived records of another clinic to find out that his previous doctor had said that he might have a cancerous growth and suggested a colonoscopy every four years. My parents never received that information because that doctor had failed to properly cauterize the polyps that he had removed and my father almost bled to death. My mother wouldn’t talk to the doctor after that, so the news of the cancerous growth was filed away.
 
After months of wrangling, I finally got the appointments to have my father tested at the VA in Freeburg. The test required for him to be sedated for a hour long scan. They gave me a pill to give him an hour before the test.
 
“ I ain’t taking no Goddamn pill,” he stared at me in anger. We were standing outside the hospital. It had taken a monumental effort on the part of my Mom and I to get him there. It was sixty miles from Concord to Freeburg and at every cross street he demanded to turn around and go home, sometimes making a grab at the wheel.
“Turn this sumbitch around you ungrateful shit. I’m sorry I ever had a son like you.”
 
“Dad, shut up. We are going to the hospital; I will stay with you the whole time, and bring you back when it is done.”
 
“Turn around now, sumbitch. Your mom needs me!”

I finally made him take the pill after threatening to leave him in Freeburg. We went in to the where was the test was to be administered and I was given a paper robe. dad and I went into the bathroom to change. I had to threaten him again. When he unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants, he had fouled himself. His whole backside was covered with shit. I had to undress him, clean him up using only paper towels and water from the sink.
 
The scan required that he remain motionless for an hour. We had to strap him to the machine. He glared at me and made snarky comments about the Asian ancestry of the doctor, “ I spent two years in the Pacific fighting you people. You started it; we finished it. Had to drop a Goddamned bomb to do it, but we did it.”
 
“Dad, please be quiet. You don’t know what you are saying.” I looked at the doctor to apologize.
 
“ I am from Cambodia, Mr. Lazarus. Please be still.”
 
I had thrown away his shit stained underwear and the shirt he was wearing. He told me to give him my shirt before we left the office. I told him that I couldn’t as it was the only shirt I had on. He would have to wear his undershirt out. I also had to put an adult diaper on him.
 
As we drove back to Concord, he was subdued. I lectured him. I knew better but couldn’t help myself. After being silent for about five minutes, he looked up at me and grinned, “It was a pretty good day, huh son?” My jaw dropped, I looked at him blankly for a few seconds,  then l had to laugh. Something in me knew that that laugh, a smile emerging out of the darkness, was a gift from God. It was the last time my dad ever made me laugh.
 
The day he died I was on my way to pick him up for the colonoscopy I had finally managed to wrest from the hands of the bureaucrats. When I turned the corner to his house, I could see my brother’s car in front of my dad’s house. I knew that it meant trouble. The phone rang, and I pushed the button on my hands free device.
 
“Danny?”
 
“Yeah?”
 
“Dad’s dead. I was giving him a shower, and he collapsed. I picked him up. He looked up at me and died.”
 
I had never seen a dead person outside of a casket. When I got to his house, I went in to the bathroom and there my father lay crumpled up on the floor. I asked my brother if he was sure. He just looked at me blankly. I reached down, picked up dad’s arm and took his pulse. There was none.
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Chapter 12   Graveyard Groupies

11/29/2018

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​Chapter 12   Graveyard Groupies
 
About nine months after Jennie left, I got invited to be a keynote speaker at a Journalism convention in San Diego. The invitation came with a week’s all expense paid stay at a luxurious ocean front hotel.  There was some talk about the column getting syndicated, so management was more than happy to give me the time off to attend.
 
When I got to the hotel after a stressful six-hour drive, I was on edge. I don’t see how people handle LA traffic. I dropped my bags off with the bellhop and made a beeline to the bar. Normally, I don’t like paying twenty dollars for hotel bar drinks, but the organizers of the convention were picking up the tab, so I sat down and ordered a Glenlivet and water and decompressed for a bit.
 
I love hotel bars and hotel lobbies. I just like to sit and breathe in the ambience and watch people sliding by on their way to doing things that their life requires. This particular hotel was loaded with bustling, interesting looking people and beautiful women. My inner sloth was happy.
 
After a couple of drinks I headed upstairs to my room. The first thing I did was find the ice machine and get ice. I was cracking open a hundred dollar bottle of Glenfarclas scotch. I don’t usually act like a scotch snob, but I was willing to splurge a bit on trips like this. It made it a bit more special.
 
I fixed a drink, rummage through my shaving kit and brought out a small medicine bottle of weed I had gotten from Remi. I rolled a joint and stepped out on the balcony.  I got situated in a big, white comfortable deck chair, inhaled a couple breaths of cool ocean air, took a sip of the scotch, and fired up the joint.
 
I was on my second hit when I heard her voice, “That certainly smells wonderful. Wish I had some.”
 
I looked around but couldn’t see anyone. I waited and the voice came again, “ I said I wish I had some.” This time I could tell it was coming from the balcony next door. I tried to look around the barrier, but it was useless.
 
“Well, you are going have to come over here then.” Seconds later, there was a soft knock on the door. I opened it cautiously and found a beautiful, tanned brunette with a somewhat sheepish grin wearing a white terry cloth robe.
 
“Hi, I’m Lisa,” she said offering her hand.
 
“Hi. Now get your ass in here before somebody else smells this joint. I didn’t bring enough for the whole damn hotel, “ I said laughing as I took her hand and led her into the room.
 
She was holding a bottle of Heineken in her left hand. I gestured that we make our way to the balcony. She lifted her robe as she sat down letting me see that she was wearing neon pink bikini.
 
“ I’m Dan by way, Daniel Lazarus,” I said handing her the joint.
 
“I'm Lisa. The Lazarus Letters? Wow. You’re the one that my friend Eddie came to hear.” She took a deep hit and started coughing.
 
“ He writes obituaries?”
 
When she got her coughing under control she said, “Yes. He’s pretty writes everything for a small town paper in Northern California. He expressly mentioned the fact that he wanted to hear you speak.”
 
“Well, that is kind of strange.” I took the joint back.
 
“He loves your wit. Tell me, how did the idea of doing a column about the dead come to you?”
 
“The sheer volume of the letters. I got a lot fan mail. It really freaked me out at first. Then I started reading some of it and understood that some of them contained very good advice about how to get on with your life when someone close has died.”
 
“That’s crazy, “ she laughed. “ I was thinking about creating my own column, and I might have to steal your idea.”
 
“You do obituaries too?”
 
“No, no, I write about relationships mostly. I was thinking that it would be a good idea to write about what happens afterwards, after the relationship ends. Damn, this is some good shit.”
 
We smoked a second joint, and I rose and got her another beer out of the minibar. As we laughed and talked, her robe slipped carelessly open a few times revealing the beautifully tanned and toned body worthy of a Playboy centerfold.
 
She caught me looking, “ Do you mind if take this robe off? It’s kind of warm today.”
 
“Fuck no, here I’ll go hang it up.” She handed me the robe and I took it the closet and put it on a hanger.  When I turned back around, she had removed her bikini and was lying completely naked on the bed.
 
For a small moment, I thought about the moral issues involved with sleeping with someone who was only about six or seven years older than my oldest daughter. Next, I tried to bring up the idea that I had only known her for less than five minutes, but I dismissed that notion before before I fully formed the sentence reasoning that you don't need a long history with angels. They appear, and you honor their presence.

I took one look at her perfect breasts and quickly decided that there were no moral issues involved. My mind screamed one last final warning, “But you love Jenny, Dumbass!” And that did give me pause, at least till the vision of Lisa's body eroded my resolve and my loins began screaming back, “But Jenny don’t love you!”
 
The best way for me to describe her breasts was the word, perfection. They were masterpieces, so beautiful and flawless that the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova would have blushed with shame at his piss poor efforts.
 
Lisa smiled and then beckoned me forward. And I went of my own accord, that is, if you can honestly say that surrendering myself to a vision of the feminine nature as  a voluntary thing.
 
My days as a sprinter were long gone; I am firmly committed distance runner. I have become a lot less competitive as I have aged. Now, it is not so important that I finish on the podium, just that I finish.
 
If this bothered Lisa, she didn’t seem to show. We took things slow and steady. On the last leg, she got on top and took over a little, moaning softly, “Oh, oh, oh.” Then with the last “Oh”, she opened her eyes, smiled, and rolled off of me.
 
I kissed her then asked, “Are you an atheist?”

She giggled, “What ever would make you ask me that?”
 
”Because most women that I have been with evoke the name of the deity when they climax. I just wonder if I’m losing my touch, or maybe you just don’t believe in God.”
 
She looked perplexed then laughed, “Well, you can relax. I’m not an atheist, but I don’t call on God either. He didn’t do the work; he don’t get the credit.”
 
“Whew! I thought I was losing it.”
 
“No, you did fine, really.”
 
“Well, let me ask you one other question then.”

“Shoot.”
 
“ You are not one of them chicks who is into totally weird stuff?”
 
“Weird being like what?”
 
“I mean you’re not an obituary writer groupie or something like that, are you?”
 
“Um, let me think. Would it matter if I was?”
 
“I don’t think so.”
 
“I might be. I mean I only know two guys who do that for a living, and I’ve slept with both of them.”
 
It was my turn to laugh, “ Look at you. You’re young and probably the most gorgeous female I’ve ever laid eyes on much less slept with, and even before I was married, gorgeous women weren’t exactly lining up to sleep with me. You’re the third beautiful woman who just kind of appeared out of nowhere and jumped into bed with me. I have to wonder, why me?”
 
Lisa smiled sadly, “ Damn, your ex must have beat you down. Give yourself some credit, Laz. You’re a handsome man, and you’re insanely funny.”
 
“Moi?”
 
“Yea, besides that you have something of a poet about you.”

“ Poet? I write obits.”
 
“You do it in a way that is very different. Eddie showed me this one that you had written about a young girl who had been murdered by her boyfriend. You wrote something like, ‘All Grace ever wanted out of life was to love and to be loved; sometimes life is just not fair.’ I mean who writes stuff like that? It makes the people you write about all seem kind of special.”
 
“They are, or they were. Frozen light.”
 
“Excuse me?”
 
“We are all light that has been frozen for a moment in time, and when we die, we go back to being light.”
 
 
“ That’s what I mean. Your wife was fool. Any further questions, you dopey guy?”
 
“I’ll stop while I’m ahead.”
 
“You mind if I take a nap?”
 
“Not in the least, in fact, I’ll join you.” So, just like that, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
 
I woke up a couple hours later. Lisa was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She was wearing one of my dress shirts and looking very sexy in it. I glanced at the clock on the table. I had missed the first session.
 
“You don’t mind?” she said asking about the shirt.
 
“You look better in it than I ever did. I already missed the first session. They’re supposed to have that Watergate guy talking at the next session. I had better go.” I jumped out of bed to get dressed.
 
“You sure? I thought we might have a second go around. Eddie is going to go see that guy, and that would give us just enough time to have some fun,” she smiled provocatively as she spoke.
 
“Sounds great, but I had really better go touch bases,” I replied as I dove into the closet another shirt.
 
“Are you sure?” she asked again.
 
I came out of closet as she unbuttoned the front of the shirt, and there they were again, the beauties. They emitted a powerful tractor beam that pulled me toward them. I twisted and struggled against the tug, but it was pointless. The next thing I knew, we were back in bed groping our way toward the finish line.
 
This time, however, when she crossed the line, she was talking in tongues.
 
She finally left to go meet her boyfriend. I got dressed and went back on the balcony. There was a large roach in the ashtray, so I fixed myself another scotch and water and finished it off.  Staring out at the ocean as the waves washed over the beach below, I started thinking about the situation.
 
Three beautiful women had virtually jumped into bed with me. This was not how things usually happened. It was more than a little bit strange, and it shook me up a little. With the exception of Remi suddenly showing back up, everything else in my life was pretty unexceptional. The three beauties were something totally out of place, as was the realization that I would have traded all of these most pleasant experiences to just close my eyes and wake up in bed next to Jennie.
 
While I was contemplating, I fell asleep out on the balcony. I began to dream. At first, it was very pleasant. I was sitting on a balcony smoking a joint and drinking some scotch. There was a slight breeze and the sound of the waves washing up against the beach was lulling me to sleep.
 
I heard someone calling me and looked down and saw Jennie standing up to her thighs in the surf. She was wearing the white bikini that made her look like the girl from Ipanema. I could hear Astrud Gilberto on radio behind me sing, “Dark and tan, young and lovely.”
 
She was walking through the breaking waves but suddenly stopped and called to me, “Danny. Come here. I need you.”
 
I instantly arose and started to look for a way down to the beach. There was a solid looking lattice next to the balcony that I felt would hold my weight. Then the sliding glass door of the balcony opened and a naked Lisa came out, grabbed me by the arm, and started pulling me back into the room. I looked in and also saw the red-headed Angel with the Leopard Skin panties, the woman from the casino, having a pillow fight on the bed with Remi’s naked stripper friend.
 
It only looked away for a second two before I broke free of Lisa’s grasp. I hustled over to the side of the balcony and climbed onto the lattice. In a jiffy, I was down on the beach. It was so real that I could the cold sand between my toes and the mist of the breaking waves on my face.
 
I looked around everywhere; I searched the sand for Jennie’s footprints and then waded into the surf loudly calling out her name. With each shout my body trembled, my mind flooded with desperation, but Jennie was gone. I awoke with a sob that shook me to my very core.
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