Memoir: Queer God Worship: Chores and Guilts
“He’d sweated through his shirt in big circles”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
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This is what I remember:
I remember that I loved my father in the way that teenage boys do. Which is to say that I hated his fucking guts most of the time, occasionally did things to try to earn his respect or praise and pretty much constantly lied my ass off about most of what I was really up to. In those days, I don’t believe I felt anything for him that approached the queer god worship that characterized the earliest days of our father and son relationship, the days before he found out I could neither throw nor catch. Nor did my feelings for him approach the depth of the feelings I have for my kids now.
I really don’t know how he felt about me in those days. But, I did love him and then one day he died.
It was May and it wasn’t raining and it was Sunday. I had spent Saturday afternoon with my girlfriend Karen, down at some festival downtown. Well that’s what I told the old man we were going to do. But then he told me that before I was going anywhere I was finishing my chores, which included cleaning the bathrooms, which included scrubbing the spots of his piss off the wall in the master bathroom.
I had to go out to the car at the curb and tell Karen she’d have to come back and get me in an hour, that I had some shit to take care of.
“Like what?” she said.
“Like come back in an hour.”
Then she said, “If it starts raining, I’m not going up to Colonel Summers with you.”
“I can’t get out of this, we’ll have to take our chances.”
She pulled away from the curb and I trudged back up the driveway and into the house to get to work.
An hour later, in the master bathroom, having saved the best for last, I was on my knees with a scrubby sponge, grinding at the off-white semi-gloss trying to get the piss up. I knew if I couldn’t do it then my mother would have to. And I knew if I couldn’t, then she couldn’t.
He was out there sitting in the same spot on the goddamn couch that he’d been in for the last five years. Well, except for the three weeks he spent in the hospital when the staph infection got bad enough that they were considering removing the lower half of his left leg if the intravenous antibiotics didn’t get it back under the control of the Desenex my mother had to wrap him in every single night.
You understand that when you weigh over five hundred pounds, even the relative youth of a thirty-seven year old body starts failing and you quit being able to do pretty much fucking everything that makes you who you really are. Who you are to the people in your life changes into a series of chores and guilts and obligations.
Like being able to hit the toilet from a standing position, for example, something you learn when you’re 12 at the oldest, becomes next to impossible.
I was down on my knees in front of his toilet, scrubbing and scrubbing and hating him every minute and thinking about how easy it would be to put some Formula 409 in his Scope bottle and wondering if they were the same color, the 409 and the Scope and hating him and wanting it to be over already. And then it was. The green-pube side of the 3M sponge had gone an off white with the paint I’d taken up. But, it wasn’t raining and Colonel Summer’s Park and being between two blankets with Karen, in public because there were people around, but not in public at the same time, took everything else away. And I came home with a smile on my face that night. I even made curfew. But he wasn’t on the couch, like usual, so he didn’t get to see it.
My mom was up in the kitchen, smoking a Kent III and emptying the dishwasher, which was usually my first chore the next morning.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He went to bed early, wasn’t feeling well,” she said.
“Whoa.”
“Brian,” she said in that way she always did when I was being rude, but she thought it was kind of funny.
She woke me up the next morning from three rooms away. It was 6:30. I don’t remember actually hearing her yelling; but I remember waking up and it must’ve been from that. I didn’t actually realize that I was awake until I was standing in their doorway. He was laying there in his size fifty-something BVDs and his Fruit of the Loom crew neck with the covers kicked all the way off the waterbed onto the floor. She was standing on his side of the bed, tears and snot running down her face, phone pressed to her ear.
I got to her as the 911 operator came on the line.
“State the Nature of Your Emergency.”
“My husband can’t speak, he isn’t breathing well.”
I looked down at him. He’d sweated through his shirt in big circles and he’d pissed himself. I looked at his face.
I haven’t seen that look before or since in anyone’s eyes. The kind of fear that may only come from knowing you are dying lights in there and says something no one can hear. And there was no peace in there, no acceptance, just wide animal terror in his watery eyes. He was struggling to speak, but his mouth didn’t cooperate. He turned his eyes from mine to look toward the foot of the bed, like he was trying to direct me with them to the stain spreading in his crotch, just as my mother pressed the phone up against my head.
It was the 911 operator. “Your mother says you’re taking CPR in school.”
“What?”
“Listen to me,” She said, “do you know CPR?”
“Shit.”
“It’s going to be all right. The fire department is already on its way and it’s only a few blocks to your house. But if he stops breathing or his heart stops before they get there, can you do CPR?”
I turned and looked out the window, trying to will the flashing lights into existence in the driveway, and said “Yes, but.”
“No buts. I’ll stay here with you on the phone until they get there. You’ll be fine.”
“It’s a waterbed.”
She said, “You should move him to the floor now, then, just in case.”
“I’m pretty sure I can’t lift him and the bed is three feet off the ground. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
She said, “You can lift him.”
“He weighs over 500…”
“Do you have a board you can put under his back?”
“Out in the garage somewhere, maybe.”
“Put your mom back on the phone and run and get it. Run.”
I was in the garage when the fire truck pulled up. I was still trying to pull the biggest chunk of plywood out of the spider webs against the wall when my grandparents came rushing out from their front half of our duplex. But, I beat them and the paramedics into the house, where I almost knocked my sister flat running down the hall carrying the chunk of wood.
About a thousand firemen and paramedics came streaming into our house, rushed past my sister and me in the hall, straight to the master bedroom, like they’d been over for a party the week before and learned the layout of the house. One of them, full fire coat and hat on, ushered me and my sister and mom into the hands of Granny and Grandad and then out to the living room. While the rest got to work on my dad.
About 30 seconds later a paramedic, blue uniform shirt and everything comes out to us in the living room with a status report.
“We can’t get the gurney down the hall, corners are too tight, so we’re going to have to walk him part way out because the space is too tight for four of us to carry him without injuring him or ourselves.”
The Navy fucked my Dad’s kidneys up with an experimental medication back in the seventies. That’s what I was told. And that combined with his weight problem and the raging staph infection that covered the entire lower half of his rather large left leg, produced an abundance of blood clots that began filling his lungs up sometime the day before. And as he lay there in bed all night, his lungs had gradually filled up with little chunks of his congealed blood. The problem was, the clots had to travel through his heart to get to his lungs.
I was standing next to the TV in the living room, looking straight down the hall at the doorway to the master bedroom. He appeared, those eyes on me again, with a fireman on each arm and one in front walking backwards holding him in balance with another one behind him propping him forward. The paramedics were at the junction leading to the front door with the gurney. And he watched me, pleading and silent over the shoulder of the fireman in front of him.
One step. Two steps. They passed the family bathroom door. Another step. Approaching the hall closet where the vacuum and winter coats and home movies and the giant white bible that no one ever read lived. He took another step and tottered. The flush in his cheeks draining, his eyes rolling down and to the side.
“Whoa Bob.”
That was his name, Bob. Named after Robert Louis Stevenson. I shit you not.
He fell to his knees, bringing the house down with him, around us.
My Grandad, all six foot three of him, with the two purple hearts and zero World War II stories, stepped in front of me, blocked my view, looked down at me and said my name.
They didn’t tell us until we’d waited in the special waiting room at the hospital for 45 minutes that he’d died somewhere in transit. I had held the thought out of my head while we waited; but they don’t put you in the special waiting room for nothing.
I ran out of there as fast as I could. Like the time I lost my temper the year before, when I sucked back into my head and watched my fists move of their own volition, I watched my body negotiate the slat-blinded door and the short hallway to the Emergency exit, the steps up through the different levels of the Good Samaritan parking lot to the street on the hill above.
Grandad found me, hands over my face, head between my knees, sitting on the curb, an empty sound in my mouth, my head, my chest. He stood me upright and puppeted me back down the stairs, whispered in my ear all the old clichés. A man now. Strong for them. A man for them. She needs you now. They need you.
We shuffled down the white corridor, following the orderly, my mother hanging on my arm, weighing me down, the tile floor reeking of that special hospital disinfectant, the fluorescent bulbs humming overhead. He turned to us as we arrived at the last door on the right and waved us in like he was doing us a favor.
My father’s body lay there, a still mound under a white sheet that we couldn't approach. We stood there, just inside the door, willing the mound to rise, to fall. Waiting for something to happen, waiting for anything to happen for so long that I felt naked under the hospital light, exposed and raw.
I pulled us forward, one step and then another, until we were alongside the table and her hand found his under the sheet and I looked away, over her head, staring at the wall like there was anything of interest there until she was finished with his hand.
I was a man for as long as I could be. I’m still not sure what I became after, through the funeral and the twenty years that followed, not sure what I am now.
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