Twilight of Sundown Soldier

The most life-changing messages in my life were delivered in a handful of words.

In 1951, Dad called my grandmother from a hospital payphone, hoisted a flask of whiskey to his lips and crowed “I have a son!” Those words kicked off complex relationships with my father and alcohol.

When a friend told me that he was gay in 1970, I replied “I think I am too” and the arc of my life instantly swerved toward a more authentic existence.

When I shared my fears about my drinking with a sober friend in 1979, she replied “I’ll take you to a meeting.” I entered my first recovery room that night and have stayed for over forty years.

In 1987, I was airlifted out of a spiral towards certain death when a nurse at the San Francisco Free Clinic said: “You’re HIV negative,”

Medical news of my parents was never so good in those days. My sister Barbie reported their grim health updates to me in a few short phrases like “Mom’s back in the hospital” or “Mom can’t walk anymore.”

A few months after my father said “I know more about the gay thing than you think“ in 1985, I got another call from my sister.

“Dad’s got cancer.”

Barbie’s voice quivered between fear and indignation.

“He had a sore throat for months and his doctor told him to take a few Tylenols every day.”

Her anger rose as she spoke.

“After a few weeks, the pain got so unbearable that he went back to that asshole who finally shined a flashlight down his throat and saw a huge bulge."

“So what did he say?” I asked, twisting the corkscrewed, yellow phone cord around my index finger like a tourniquet.

“Nothing! He just handed him off to a cancer surgeon!”

She paused to catch her breath while I laid down on the bed, closed my eyes and twisted the cord a little tighter.

It was hard to absorb the fact that Dad was sick. Mom had been the main focus of our attention for years, ever since she lost her sense of balance in her mid-50’s. The same asshole-doctor referred her to a neurologist in St. Louis who stated that her acute vertigo was caused by alcoholism and/or brain trauma.

When I heard this in an earlier call, an image of Mom crumpled up in the bathtub sprang to mind. After a night of drinking, she fell backwards, hit her head on the tiles and knocked herself out cold. I’d find her there many mornings before school as a teenager. I was so numb to her sorry plight by then that I just brushed my teeth and left her in the tub.

From somewhere deeper inside, I also heard Dad’s hands thumping against her head during a late-night brawl.

Since my parents didn’t like the sound of these root causes, they headed north to the Mayo Clinic where they received a more palatable diagnosis: a genetic condition called cerebellar-spinal ataxia.

It sounded better, but the prognosis was terrible. Mom would lose all of her motor functions in the coming years. The specialist added that there would be no cognitive damage, like it was good news. But It really meant that she would also suffer unrelenting mental and physical anguish as her body shut down.

My throbbing finger brought me back to the present.

“Dad asked me to go with him to the surgeon this morning,” Barbie continued.

That didn’t sound good. Dad always insisted on doing such things alone.

“So what did that doctor say?” I asked, watching my finger turn blue.

“Oh, he was even worse!”

She mimicked the surgeon’s officious tone.

“You have a very large tumor on your larynx. We see this in people who smoke and drink too much.”

She took another deep breath and continued her low-pitched impersonation.

“I’m not going to operate on you because you’re an alcoholic and you won’t survive the surgery. Even if you do, your face will look like a hand grenade went off in it!”

“Dad bent over in his chair and buried his head in his hands,” Barbie added, returning to her own voice.

The doctor turned his attention to her.

“Are you with me?” Barbie said, imitating him again.

“Oh, I’m with you,” she replied glaring daggers at him.

Then she stood up, lifted Dad from his chair, guided him out of the office and slammed the door.

On the drive home, Dad stared down at the floor mats while Barbie eviscerated the surgeon from behind the wheel.

“What a shithead! Dr. Mengele had a better bedside manner in the concentration camps!”

At the sound of the Nazi’s name, Dad’s inner army captain snapped to attention.

“Fuck him! I’m going to Mayo!” he rasped.

By the time Barbie called me, she and Dad had already arranged to arrive in Rochester the next morning.

“Please come. We need you, ” Barbie pleaded in a teary voice.

“I’ll see you in Minnesota,” I replied.

I hung up, untangled my finger and dialed my boss to tell her that I’d be gone for at least a week. Then I booked my reservations for the next afternoon.

It was early evening when I finished packing and making all of my arrangements. With nothing left to distract me, I felt the metal bar crank down on my groin for another scary ride on the medical rollercoaster. As intolerable feelings rose up inside, I jumped into my car and, as if by alchemy, converted them into adrenalin by cruising the streets for anonymous sex. I’d been doing this a lot since the city closed down the baths

At 3:00 AM, I returned home alone, unsatisfied and too worn out to feel anything like an emotion. 

Early on Thursday morning, Barbie and Dad boarded a TWA flight in search of a miracle. I landed in Minneapolis that afternoon and picked up a rental car. When I switched on the radio, there was ongoing news coverage of Rock Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis. Since Reagan was a friend of the movie star, I wondered if he’d finally acknowledge the existence of the epidemic as I pushed down on the gas and barreled down Highway 52.

As I walked into the lobby of the Kahler Hotel, Dad popped up from a chair and rushed toward me. As he approached, he looked gaunt but relieved to see me. When he wrapped me in a bear-hug, I was so taken aback by this display of affection that I stood frozen in his skinny arms. He stuck by my me at the check-in desk and shunted Barbie aside as we entered the elevator. On the ride up to our floor, I saw the injured look in my sister’s eyes.

She had been the dutiful, boots-on-the-ground daughter throughout our parents’ many ordeals. I had left St. Louis fifteen years earlier vowing never to return. My burgeoning retail career was my main excuse for staying away, but I didn’t get off scot-free. Besides a demanding job, I had my hands full of sick and dying friends in San Francisco.

We dropped Dad off to rest by himself in the room he had reserved for Barbie and him, then crossed the hall to my room to collapse onto twin beds.

After a few moments of stilted silence Barbie sighed:

“OK, I’m a little hurt … but, to be honest, I really need a break. You take over for a while.”

She fell asleep as I sat up wondering what I had just stepped into.

On Friday morning we went to a nearby diner. Dad slid into a red, vinyl booth beside me while, from the other side of the table, Barbie caught me up on the previous day’s appointments. A series of doctors had performed a barrage of tests to determine if Dad could withstand a major surgery, but we had to wait until Monday to get the results.

Dad listened in silence, stared at the Formica tabletop and nodded occasionally. Speaking had become difficult, and eating was out of the question for him. The scent of bacon wafting up from my plate made me remember that Dad loved cooking it every morning.

After breakfast, we followed the shiny, tea-and-yellow checkerboard linoleum floors through the teal-walled corridors to the throat surgeon’s office. Along the way, I inhaled the reek of floor wax and disinfectant that I knew so well from the hospitals of San Francisco. As we approached the office door, I wondered if these odors would displace my father’s beloved bacon as the the dominant scent in his life.

The office was a large, sunlit room flanked by tall windows. The strapping doctor rose, came around from behind his oak desk, stuck out his hand to Dad and introduced himself by his first name. He nodded to us, pulled up a chair next to Dad and looked him in the eyes. He was a swarthy man in his early-forties with a gym-toned chest that pulled at the buttons of his white coat.

“You have the biggest tumor I’ve ever seen, but I’m sure I can remove it.,” he said.

Dad perked up in his chair.

“We’ll have the test results first thing on Monday morning. Afterwards, I’ll either perform the surgery or we can explore other options.”

He went on to explain the procedure to my eager father, but I wasn’t listening. My mind was stuck on “explore other options.” I’d heard the words before. They usually meant a lot of pain before dying.

As we made our way down the hallway to the next appointment, Dad croaked:

“I like that guy, he’s a straight-shooter.”

As we entered the cramped office of a speech therapist, the aroma of Aqua Velva hung in the air. A nerdy man introduced himself as “Mr. James” from his seat behind the desk.The black-framed glasses made his round, pale face look pasty. His slicked-back gray hair touched the collar of his pink, short-sleeved, wash-and-wear shirt. A large, gold watch festooned his scrawny wrist and his delicate fingers sported a thick wedding ring with a diamond embedded in its center.

In a priestly voice laced with a thick Minnesota accent, he painted a rosy picture of Dad’s post-operative recovery. He cheerily showed us an electronic vibrating device that could be held against the throat to stimulate the vocal cords. I had seen similar appliances in the hands of older alcoholics at AA meetings. Their voices were unsettling; tinny and robotic.

After Mr. James popped a videotape into a VCR on his desk, he dimmed the lights and left the room. For the next ten minutes, a small TV screen depicted throat-cancer-success-stories who demonstrated how to use the vibrator.

Dad watched with unvarnished skepticism. The scowl on his face made it clear that he wasn’t buying these happy scenarios. At the end of the tape, Mr. James slipped back into the room, turned up the lights and handed us a few pamphlets before ushering us to the door.

Halfway through the skyway on our way back to the hotel, Dad broke his surly silence.

“I don’t trust that character, his spiel sounds like a sales job.”

I already knew that Mr. James wasn’t his kind of man. He had three strikes against him.

Strike One: Nasal, “Minnie-soh-ta” accents always rankled Dad.

Strike Two: Gemstones on men were a pet peeve. “Never trust a man with a diamond ring” was one of Dad’s favorite sayings.

Strike Three: His name sounded like a hairdresser.

I switched rooms with Barbie that day and settled into a front row seat to Dad’s stoic suffering from an adjacent full-sized bed. He spent most of the afternoon in boxer shorts and a tee shirt, his elbows propped up at the foot of the bed on a teal-and-yellow striped bedspread. He stared at sports on television and occasionally spit saliva into an ice bucket since swallowing had become too painful. Whenever he forced himself to take a sip of water to stave off dehydration, he exhaled a low-pitched “agggghhhhhh” like he had downed a mouthful of battery acid.

In spite of his misery, he insisted on getting dressed each evening to take Barbie and me to dinner on the top floor of the Kahler. The restaurant continued the teal and yellow theme in its carpet, tablecloths and napkins. The large dining room was illuminated by floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Rochester skyline. Dad ate nothing, spat into his napkin and spent most of his time gazing out the window as dusk settled over the plains.

When the waitress set a roast beef dinner in front of me, I felt a pang of guilt for eating in Dad’s presence, but he took no notice. His eyes were glued to the darkening landscape beyond the windows.

“This is always my bad time,” he mused.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I always get a little blue when the sun goes down. Ever since I was a kid,” he responded.

His words made me remember countless evenings as a child when he returned from work, swept past me and retreated into his bedroom. Unaware of his need to sleep through every sunset, I was convinced that he just didn’t like his sissy-son.

I plunged into my mashed potatoes and gravy to bury a newfound sadness over the decades of misunderstood distance between my father and me.

On Monday morning, my mother’s sister Deedee drove in from St. Paul to take part in the appointment that would reveal the test results that led to surgery or “other options.” We arrived twenty minutes early and staked out four seats in the huge waiting room.

The place felt like something out of a Kafka novel. Its over-sized, oxblood-leather chairs enveloped several families who awaited their destinies while faking interest in outdated magazines. A random whisper occasionally broke the church-like solemnity of the antechamber.

Dad squirmed in his seat for fifteen minutes, then suddenly bolted for the men’s room. A nurse came out and announced his name a minute later, so I rushed in toward the bathroom to fish him out. Before I hit the door, the familiar stench of his Old Gold, unfiltered cigarette assaulted my nostrils.

He stood in a stall with the door open, propping himself straight-armed against the teal-and-white tiled wall behind the toilet. A shroud of smoke lingered over the back his bowed head. When I told him that it was time to go, he flicked the butt into the toilet and pushed down the handle with his loafer.

“I just wanted to have one last smoke. I know they’re going to tell me to quit.”

When he turned toward me, I saw the face of a naughty schoolboy and squelched an urge to hug him.

He stiffened his spine and blew past me punching open the bathroom door. He strode up to the nurse and marched alongside her to a small examination room while Deedee, Barbie and I trailed behind him like ducklings.

The internist got right to the point.

“All of the blood work looks good,” he started.

He slapped Dad’s chest x-rays onto the fluoroscope.

“Now the first thing you’ll notice is that most of the ribs have been broken.”

Barbie and I exchanged a knowing glance.

Portrait of an alcoholic.

As I stared at the backlit travesty of a torso, I remembered one morning when Dad’s moans from the bathroom had awakened me as a kid. Peeking through a crack in the door, I watched him gingerly winding an Ace bandage around his badly bruised midsection. When I asked Mom about it, she replied:

“Oh, he’s just fixing a few broken ribs.”

“Shouldn’t he go to the hospital?” I asked in a worried, seven-year-old voice.

She patted my shoulder.

“Oh, honey, he learned how to take care of these things in the army.”

My face must have looked un-reassured, so she added:

“Besides, his mother was a Christian Scientist.”

I had no idea what that meant, so I went back to my room and dressed for school.

My thoughts returned to the consultation room just as the internist was pointing out some light shadows in Dad’s lungs.

“This early-stage emphysema poses no problems for surgery,” he said while clicking off the light box.

He then picked up a sheet of paper and studied it.

“And now for the liver test …”

He took a long, dramatic pause.

I held my breath, totally convinced that Dad’s liver had long ago hardened into stone. I avoided Barbie’s eyes and perused the anatomical chart on the wall until the doctor announced:

“… it looks completely healthy.”

Dad let loose with a hoarse, belly-laugh, Aunt Deedee dropped her purse and tears puddled up in Barbie’s eyes. I turned and looked at Dad in disbelief. He beamed back a victorious smile.

The old soldier had cheated death once again.

“We’ll schedule surgery first thing tomorrow morning,” the internist continued.

Just then, I felt a tiny fissure open up inside of me and, against my better judgment, I let a drop of cruel hope seep through a crack in my hardened heart.

Post-Script: When Dad mentioned that he wanted to talk me about “the gay thing” (see Three Dollar Bill post), I put it out of my mind. I never got my hopes up where he was concerned. When we got the go-ahead for the surgery, I suddenly realized that I wanted more time with my father. After decades of estrangement, I was finally ready to listen to what he had to say and let him into my life a bit.

It had recently dawned on me that we might actually have some things in common. Like Dad as a young man on the battlefields of World War II, I was suffering the loss of comrades and the constant threat of death in San Francisco. Maybe we could connect on the level of grief and terror. With more time, and the aid of an electronic voice box, he might even comfort me and share some wisdom on how to navigate through the pain.

Charging headlong into the operation, no one had any inkling of the nightmare that waited Dad on the other side of the surgeon’s table.