Leg, p.21
Leg, page 21
Communicating with Dad now could be like chatting with the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, a mess of hard vowels that looped into short, cryptic sentences. You had to repeat after him, reduce complex ideas to one-word answers. Pillow? Pee? Suction?
To chat, your first move was to suction away any mucus that might clog his airway. We’d all piled into my parents’ room to watch ER every Thursday night when I was a kid, and I liked to pretend I was a doctor, or at least a respiratory therapist. I’d call for “three cc’s of saline.” (They were actually milliliters.) “The little pink vial thingies,” I’d tell Kevin, wagging a finger at Tiffany’s old white dresser.
Once I’d twisted the top off the vial of saline and given a few good squirts down Dad’s trachea, I’d tell Kevin to turn on the suction vacuum. “Ready for a suck!” Then I’d wiggle a tube through the joint at the hollow of Dad’s neck and down his inner cannula, the tube in his windpipe that had popped out a couple of times. The machine would beep, coughs would rattle Dad’s body, but with no air passing over his vocal cords they were silent coughs. We joked that we’d finally invented a mute button. “Don’t worry,” I’d tell Kevin. “He only looks like he’s dying.”
I didn’t bring many friends around my dad. I suppose I felt protective of him, not just of his modesty but of the able-bodied guy they’d grown up admiring. Kevin was an exception: older, wiser, part of my new life as a gay man, not my old one as a child in the closet.
Kevin never handled any of my dad’s bathroom needs but he was good for a hang. Kevin’s dad was a retired physician who had counted among his patients the recently deceased president of the Mormon church. From a young age Kevin had grown used to being in medical situations. He absorbed my lessons like one of the little pink sponges we used to wet Dad’s mouth. Striding into the bedroom, he’d shake my dad’s emaciated shoulder and then pull up a chair. “Hey, Bob. How’s it going?”
“Hey! Not too bad to-day,” Dad would say, humming and coughing weakly between words after I had deflated his cuff. Hot Mary, his speech therapist, had taught him to articulate every syllable, like he was just learning to read. Even at his best, Dad sounded like he was talking through an electric fan. “I just got back from a run. Now I’m going to have a cup of coffee and read the paper.”
ALS hadn’t affected Dad’s dorky sense of humor as much as his diaphragm, a fact some of his friends, understandably, found confusing. Bob was going for a run? Drinking coffee? They never said as much but you could tell they weren’t sure at first if their buddy had lost his marbles. I liked that Kevin went along with our dumb jokes, rarely missing a beat. “He’s just saying how much he loves me,” I’d translate.
“Forget coffee, Bob,” Kevin would say. “Next time, I’ll bring beer.”
Kevin saw my dad the way I did, not as a dying man gurgling out last wishes, spit bubbles popping over his teeth, but as a prankster who’d stick his tongue out the corner of his mouth and, with what smile he could manage, pretend to be dead.
The weirdest thing about Kevin was that he actually enjoyed the chaos of my family. He began calling as soon as I got off work; a few times, he was already at the house when I pulled up. I rang Kevin from work one afternoon to see what he was up to and he gayly reported, “I’m at lunch with your mom and sister. They’re right here. Should I pass the phone?”
“Is this part of a twelve-step program?” I asked. “Are you a saint?”
Kevin had studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and always brought over a basket of fresh ham-and-cheese croissants or a pan of double-chocolate brownies. Mom savored those brownies so much she hid them in a Tupperware container in the office so she didn’t have to share. Kevin made dumplings from scratch at the kitchen counter and never failed to whip up a snack from whatever was in the fridge. He complimented me on my articles about reiki therapists, high-speed chairlifts, and frozen yogurt shops out at the junction. I liked having Kevin around to feed me and tell me I was doing a good job, that I was a good son.
It was no small blessing that, by May, the renovations to make the house wheelchair accessible were mostly complete. The problem was they’d come too late: Dad was deteriorating faster than anyone had expected. We’d planned for the long haul, spent too much money on amenities Dad couldn’t use anymore. The elevator broke bimonthly. The squirt of the in-toilet bidet was as weak as a Camano clam. A ten-dollar commode and a baby wipe did just as well.
It could get stuffy and crowded in Tiffany’s room with all those sputtering machines. As the spring thawed, Dad perspired freely, like he was running a marathon in bed. He was most comfortable in an adult brief, running shorts, and an old running shirt split down the back so his limp wrists and rigid arms could be steered through the sleeves one at a time. His feet were red and swollen and stayed white when you pressed them. On walks in Liberty Park he wore sandals, as one of the few joys remaining to him was feeling fresh air between his toes. My mom would tuck her nightgown into a pair of jeans and Danny would drive the silver Dodge Sprinter van in his bath slippers.
“That’s the kind of family we are: clothing optional,” I told Kevin.
Kevin came with us on walks so often he got sunburned. He was happy to be an extra set of hands. After we steered Dad off the van’s ramp, Kevin would lug the suction device, spare tubes, pink vials of saline, and sundry medical equipment around the duck pond while I brandished the new Nikon I’d bought to take pictures for the paper. More and more, I was using the camera to document my own life. My chemo-shorn mom and be-tubed dad competed for backwards glances with dudes tossing devil sticks, tightrope walkers practicing a foot off the ground, and Mayan dancers rehearsing in ceremonial headdresses.
Every morning before driving up the canyon to the newspaper, I made Dad kiss my cheek and tell me I was his favorite. I had mixed feelings about being away from home so much in what was already looking like the final spring of his life. Still, I think it did Dad good to see me going off to work in the Lexus he could no longer drive. Dad had to sell his community newspaper business to pay his and Mom’s medical bills and keep our family solvent, and I liked the idea that I was carrying on his legacy in some small way, albeit at a paper he had never owned. He said his biggest regret of dying in his fifties was that he wouldn’t get to see how it all turned out. I wanted to show him it was going to turn out just fine.
As the business editor of the Park Record, I wrote every article in the small section, hammered out briefs, took photos, did basic layout, and plugged any holes with press releases. I’d roll in at ten A.M. on production days, my heels crushing the back of a pair of moccasins, and get to work accidentally cutting off my articles mid-sentence and introducing typos into my clever captions. Despite my shortcomings, I was probably the best gay editor with tight tendons to ever work at the paper.
What I remember most about those early months at the Record was being exhausted. My dad’s aide, Regina, worked full-time during the day, but we still had to contend with nights and weekends. We were the graveyard shift: Danny, Mom, and I. Even when I was off-duty, I stirred before sunrise to the polite but insistent single chime of my dad’s doorbell and rolled over, praying for someone else to intervene, only to hear the machine go berserk. Coming to my senses, I’d charge down the hall in my boxers, hoping my negligence hadn’t killed him.
Being that tired made me even more forgetful than usual, and “usual” for me includes a damaged cerebellum. I locked my keys in the Lexus about once a month and racked up speeding tickets. During my lunchbreak, not wanting to get caught dozing in the car, I’d sneak off to my family’s rental condo near the Park Record building and come back to the newsroom with cowlicks and pillow creases on my face.
Kevin was a nice escape, the calm amid the chaos, sort of the way Dad had been in the old days. After work, he would take me out for root beer floats or to a lookout point behind the state capitol where we could watch the sunset, never daring to steal a kiss in public. We went deer spotting in Salt Lake Cemetery, tested the physics of Gravity Hill, and drove by the house in Federal Heights where, a few years earlier, Elizabeth Smart had been abducted and then miraculously returned.
I was a kid given to abstraction and flights of fancy. If I were running on the treadmill in the basement, I’d keep the TV on mute and Dad’s room monitor near me. If Dad, Danny, and Regina were upstairs watching a movie—Saving Private Ryan was a favorite—it created an audio mix on my end that was part real world, part sound effects; part medical machinery, part movie magic. I liked to imagine that if I went upstairs I’d find my dad and Danny in the midst of a great adventure, battling Nazis from Dad’s hospital bed.
It did sound stupid saying it aloud, but Kevin insisted I was in good company. “Like Snoopy and the Red Baron!”
Let’s just say the man egged on my creative side.
Our dates took on a dreamy, giddy quality. We’d talk about the documentaries we’d make, the places we’d travel. I wanted to take Stana to Poland to research her origins. Stana’s dad was Jewish and she had survived the Holocaust as an infant only because her parents had thought to hide her in blankets at the foot of their bed when the Gestapo had come to take them away in the night. Stana would tell her harrowing life story to anyone who would listen, usually when she should have been vacuuming, and had once given my mom a priceless crystal vase, a family heirloom, that still had the TJ Maxx sticker on the bottom.
Being around Kevin reminded me of my Future Problem Solving days; he thought way, way outside the box. He could talk for hours about sustainability, Zoroastrians, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and the Angel Moroni. He also just liked being along for the ride, liked writing poems with me under the gazebo at night, or playing water basketball with my brother and his friends in the pool.
It felt right to bring him back to my childhood room, to the school awards and sportsmanship trophies gathering dust on my desk. When I moved home from college, Mom hired a painter to gloss over the sports wallpaper from my closeted teen years. My walls were now a sophisticated shade of burgundy and my room still smelled like paint. A stack of frames that included my Wizard of Oz poster and a caricature of myself at SeaWorld were piled against one sticky wall. With Dad sick, I didn’t have anyone to hang them for me. My stuffed animals were in garbage bags in the freezer room. I was trying to be an adult.
Kevin was shy about sex at first, saying it took him a while to get going. The truth is, he was starved for it. He made vague allusions to a guy who’d pursued him back in Phoenix but I was his first boyfriend. After I showed him how to top me, I’d wake up to him pulling down my boxers, his stubble scratching my thighs. Following my Croatian fling with Tyler Townsend, I’d dated a couple guys back in Chicago, including the bathroom-stall bandit. A chlamydia scare senior year, and the prospect of having a Q-tip shoved up my urethra, transformed me from a casual condom user into a diehard, but I still felt self-conscious about my spazzy right leg and couldn’t stop myself from making silly comments about how I wasn’t bad in the sack if I stretched first. Blushing a little, Kevin would tell me about his famous pioneer great-great-grandpa who had hobbled to the Salt Lake Valley on a wooden leg, pulling a handcart. “At least you still have the original set,” Kevin said.
He didn’t talk much about his ex-wife, a concert cellist, though she was a professor and easy enough to find on the internet. They had traveled the world together in their twenties, shacking up in Paris, Moscow, and Manhattan. Mostly during those years Kevin managed his wife’s career, securing grants and making meals, but during their stint in New York, he had enrolled at Yale and took the train up to New Haven several times a week.
The plan had been for him to major in urban planning, but somewhere along the way his marriage had fallen apart. This is where his story got hazy, a kind of smash cut that plopped him in Phoenix, a newly out divorcé with joint ownership in a catering company. The business had started hot but gone belly-up after nine months, or Kevin had simply abandoned it. Either way, he’d ditched his partners and moved home to meditate under a tree in his parents’ backyard for a while, which is what he’d been up to when he’d gotten a call from his middle school FPS coach, the vegan with the Chihuahua named Atilla, asking him to be a judge at the state bowl.
In retrospect, Kevin’s byzantine backstory should have been the first sign something was amiss.
For an unemployed guy living with his folks, his past was as adventurous and far-flung as a race around the world, with even more checkered flags. Understandably, the divorce was the part he was really hung up on. He called himself the prodigal husband. “I pushed her too hard to succeed,” he would say. “She was tired of being a nomad.”
“And being married to a gay guy,” I’d add.
I teased Kevin but I was bowled over by him. He hadn’t spent his twenties at his dad’s deathbed, jerking off and sobbing in his childhood bedroom. He’d lived! A sham marriage, an aborted Ivy League education, the not-so-subtle hints of a nervous breakdown . . . and he could cook? Come on. Kevin was almost too good to be true.
***
We were in the hot tub in the backyard finishing root beer floats the first time Kevin brought up wanting to start a church. “A church!” I exclaimed. I wasn’t sure whether to smile, if this was a joke. Kevin described himself as a seeker, not a fundamentalist, and too skeptical of the powers that be to attend church. Now he wanted to start one? Had someone implanted a chip in his brain, like in an FPS skit?
Kevin drifted over to me and wiped some dried ice cream from my chin with his thumb. The chlorine dispenser spun in his wake like a flying saucer. Not like the Mormon church, Kevin chuckled, but a church to save the planet. We’d get around using horse and buggy, build houses that faced west to soak up natural light, burn candles, brew beer. As part of this new religion, he wanted to move to London to start a microbrewery and artist commune where folks could come together and create, like the Carmelite nuns in town who made fudge.
“What’s the free pot situation going to be?” I asked. I was trying to doodle a penis onto my empty Hires cup, the wax piling up under my fingernails. I only ever drew flaccid penises. I thought they were cute.
“A little pot would be fun,” Kevin said, grinning wickedly. He tugged at my leg, pulling it onto his lap, and dug his thumbs into my small, hairy calf. It felt good. “Just don’t touch my scars,” I said, because that made me nauseous. I let my cup shoot off into the bubbles as Kevin’s fingers crawled up my swim trunks.
The AC unit next to the hot tub chugged on and, as if it were attached to a fan large enough to cool the whole backyard, a corresponding breeze moved through the aspens and cottonwood trees, carrying away twists of chlorine-smelling steam. Dad’s bedroom window was open on the second story. If his machines weren’t too loud, he could probably hear us splashing around in the hot tub. It was surreal to be down there talking about wanting to smoke a joint as he lay above us, breathing through a hole in his throat.
The next I heard of the Church of Kevin was at his cousin Trisha’s new apartment on 45th South. We were passing around a two-liter bottle of Diet Shasta and a bag of baked barbecue chips—Holladay’s version of health food—when Kevin asked if we wanted to see the logo he’d had a graphic designer mock up. He pulled it up on Trisha’s computer. It looked like a coat of arms.
“Now for the big surprise,” Kevin said. He asked Trisha to turn off the lights as he scrolled through his inbox to find the link to a real estate listing. Trisha and I closed our eyes and when we opened them, an Edwardian mansion lit up Trisha’s computer screen and most of her tiny living room and kitchen.
The estate was surrounded by oak trees and bluebells and had mullioned windows and a ballroom with a two-story ceiling. “I’m putting an offer on this place,” Kevin said. The house was in Hampstead, “the heart of literary London,” according to the listing, and cost millions of pounds. Kevin called it, accurately enough, the abbey. Its real name was something like Wenton House. It was the kind of house that had a name.
I’d just met Trisha but she reminded me of the Mormon girls I’d gone to high school with: she was big and athletic, with a short blonde ponytail and an irrepressible smile. It was comforting experiencing the abnormal with someone so down-to-earth. She seemed used to dealing with blowhard boys.
Trisha set down her Solo cup of Diet Shasta by the keyboard and pulled her ponytail tighter, wrinkling her nose. “I wouldn’t want to live in such a big place, would you?” she asked, trying to give Kevin an out.
“The size worries me not at all,” Kevin replied, clicking through photos of a cozy study, an entryway with a crystal chandelier, and a kitchen filled with gleaming modern appliances. That was one of Kevin’s verbal tics: he’d say the opposite of what he meant and then add “not at all” to the end of it. It gave his every utterance a preliminary feel. “It’s a fairly modest property for what I have in mind.”
Unsettled, I begged off to meet some high school friends. After ordering a Coors Light at the bar, I realized I wasn’t sure how to explain Kevin and his antics, what I felt about his spiritual side or my own. What did a brewery and a swanky English estate have to do with starting a church anyway? When I came home an hour later, my clothes perfumed with smoke, Dad was banging on the footboard of his bed and bucking his hips. Thankfully, the green and red numbers on his respirator weren’t flashing. “Can you breathe?” I rushed to his side without thinking to turn on a light. “What’s going on? Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
Dad nodded yes and clicked his tongue so I fished through the commode until I found his urinal. To think I’d been worried about the prospect of handling Dad’s dick. I was now so comfortable I could do it in the dark, almost without thinking.
