Queer God Worship: The Bad Penny
“He just lay there, propped up, staring at me”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
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1987 was not terribly kind to my family. Before we hit mid-year both my grandad and my grandpa had died, within six weeks of each other. Shortly after that, my grandma passed away as well. None of these deaths were expected. And though we were numb already, they hurt, especially the first one. This is what I remember:
My grandad was six-foot three and looked every bit the spitting image of a giant Cab Calloway. To me he was just Grandad, and I never took in the way he looked as being any different from the other older men around me while I was growing up. Grandad was born in 1917, and his father abandoned him and his older sister Doris, and my great-grandmother, Neva, a couple years after he was born. Grandad had to grow up fast, and he assumed “man of the house” duties at the same age that I was still playing with Star Wars action figures and watching cartoons after school on channel twelve.
In the years before he went to the Pacific Theater of World War II, Grandad drove a Ford panel truck, delivering bread from Corvallis down to Monroe. He earned two Purple Hearts during World War II, but never would tell me, my mom, or anyone else a single story of his time in the South Pacific. When he got out of the Army in 1945, he and my granny tried to settle in Charleston, South Carolina, where my mother was born. But, they couldn’t get anyone to rent to them. I suspect that growing up in Oregon, his color was as invisible to him as it was to me.
It took the reaction of a girlfriend I brought home with me to my mom’s house several years after Grandad died, for me to understand what was plain for everyone else to see. She stood in my mother’s hallway, taking in the picture of Grandad, decked out in his 1930’s finery and pencil moustache, leaning cock-sure against the fender of his delivery truck, and she exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were black!” Grandad used to say that we were Black-Irish and would mess with me for wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day.
Grandad had a thing for Mountain Bars, and would sit in his brown Naugahyde recliner and smoke filter-less Camels, eating his Mountain Bars and watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, before he and Granny would go off to take out their false teeth and sleep in their parallel single beds.
He had owned a tavern across from The Grotto on NE Sandy Boulevard in Portland, then he owned a grocery store in Kelso, Washington. Finally he took my mother and Granny to Roseburg, Oregon with him, where he worked as a millwright at Roseburg Lumber until his early retirement, due to “nerve damage.”
His hands shook nearly all the time. He told dirty jokes to the men of the family, in the hallway off the kitchen. He’d shoo me away, and then I’d hear them laughing all the way from the living room. He spent his days wood-working in the little single-car garage off of their half of the duplex, that we shared with them. Whenever I, or anyone else, would ask him what he was doing in there, he’d say “making a rudder for a duck.” He helped me build my entry for the Cub Scout pine box derby. He taught me to drive. He used to refer to any small distance as a “cunt hair.” As in, “Can you roll your window down a cunt hair for me, boy?”
Granny used to complain about the bottles of Vodka he’d have stashed away in various places in that garage. One day, in 1987, he slipped on a little spill of three-in-one out there and opened his head on the cracked cement floor. I was getting ready to hitchhike to Portland from Eugene for the weekend with my roommate Eric when I got the call. “You don’t have to come,” my mom said. So I didn’t. It was just like that.
Grandad had been in and out of Salem General getting radiation for his lung cancer for the past year, while I tried to figure out how to be an eighteen-year-old adult down in Eugene. We had grown apart. He refused to come to family therapy while I was in the Sacred Heart Adolescent Recovery Program for teenage alcoholics and drug addicts. I hadn’t become the man he’d needed me to be in the wake of my father’s death. I hadn’t been there for my mother, my sister. I was weak and needed help, and time.
Eric literally had his hand on the doorknob, backpack on, me, right behind him, when the phone rang. Eric, the roommate who was raised by his gay uncle, and a series of his uncle’s lovers. Eric, the roommate who introduced me to Zappa and the Coen brothers. The one who taught me to hitchhike. My first roommate. The one who fled from our first group sex experience when our big aggressive neighbor overheard the noises and insinuated himself into the foursome we had going with a couple of other teenagers we brought home from late night coffee at Larry and Kathy’s after a meeting at the Jesco Club.
I got off the phone with my mom, turned to Eric like, “what the fuck am I supposed to do now?” and the phone rang again. I turned back to the phone, ready to change plans and go home like the good prodigal son. I answered, but it wasn’t my mom. It was Ryan, our wicked annoying friend from AA. The one who wore the fringed leather jacket and did his hair like George Michael, the one who had to repeatedly come out of the closet to everyone, just in case we forgot. I held Ryan in a kind of nauseated awe. He seemed to know who he was in a way that I didn’t, but he wouldn’t shut up about it.
Ryan started in on the phone immediately. He knew we were leaving for Portland, and his rich-lawyer mom was on her way to the airport in a taxi, and even though he wasn’t ever supposed to drive her 911 Carrera, he knew where the keys were and was picking us up in fifteen minutes to take us to Portland.
Ryan did the hour and forty-five minute drive to Portland in less than an hour with Master of Puppets, blaring out of the stereo, me, crammed onto the shelf the Porsche had instead of a back seat, and Ryan trying to get Eric to feed him bumps of crystal out of a baggy in the glove box. He’d run up behind people going 80 in the fast lane, doing around 135, flashing his brights repeatedly. He’d weave in and out of triple tractor-trailers, catching gravel on the shoulder, passing on the right. It was the second or third most insane passenger experience of my life, after running from the cops on the back of a Honda V65 Magna out the Sunset Corridor, and riding back to high school stoned from x-period with two other idiots on the hood of my friend Jim’s 64 Nova.
When we got to Portland, Ryan had an agenda. And because he had the car…first, we went to Fruit Loop in Washington Park and spied on the old queers picking up hustlers. Then we headed to the Metro Cafe. Then we went out to 122nd avenue to cruise the strip. Then we ended up at the Red Lion on Union Avenue eating breakfast at four in the morning.
When we came out of the restaurant at dawn, Ryan freaked out, claiming that he saw a car that belonged to a friend of his mother in the IHOP parking lot across the street. He needed to get back to Eugene, right away. So he dropped us off at the Rose Garden up by where we started the evening.
Eric and I smoked cigarettes and watched the sun rise over the Cascades, talking until Eric figured it was late enough in the morning to walk to his uncle Frank’s.
Frank wasn’t actually Eric’s uncle, but one of Eric’s uncle’s exes. When we got to his place at the south end of 1st in downtown, he buzzed us up. Call me a bumpkin, but I’d never ridden an elevator that many floors up. The view was unlike anything I’d seen from an apartment window.
Frank introduced us to his dying lover, and offered us a shower. Eric laughed, and said, “It’s not like that Frank.” But then Eric turned away from the conversation and walked over to the window, silent.
Frank explained to me that he had worked for some years in the oil and gas industry in Brazil, and that it was so goddamn hot in Rio that it was customary to offer your shower to guests as they arrived. He might’ve said something about it being rude to decline as well, or I may have stuffed that into the memory to give it rounder corners.
Eric and Frank and I split from the apartment and walked through downtown to Saturday Market. I got a greasy dark spring roll the size of a cock and burnt the roof off my mouth when the grease exploded out of it. Some of it ran down my chin and dripped into the paper tray next to the greasy dipping sauce in the little pleated cup.
The three of us wandered around inside the Skidmore Fountain Building. Frank and I ended up going to the bathroom at the same time, in adjacent stalls. I can still hear the whoosh of him letting go into the toilet. I wondered if he had it to, if that was why he crapped like a waterbag rupturing.
That afternoon, bored, near broke, Eric and I said goodbye to Uncle Frank and hit I-5, just south of the 405 interchange. Thumbs out smiling as big as we could, one foot kicked out, leaning as far back as we could without falling over, trying to look like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Just as the light was starting to fade from the sky we scored a ride from a guy going as far as Salem.
When we got out at the Market Street exit in Salem it was full on twilight and starting to spit and no matter how hard you smile, no one is stopping in the dark, in the rain to pick up two dudes thumbing. We tried anyway for around an hour, getting more and more soaked, feeling more and more miserable. I finally gave up and called Mom.
She drove up to Salem, collected us, dropped Eric off at our place and took me up to the hospital.
When I entered my grandad’s room the lights were dim. My granny sat at the side of the bed, her hand on the blanket beside the lump of his body. He just lay there, propped up, staring at me. I said, “How’s it going?”
He stared.
I said, “You feeling any better?”
He kept staring, like I wasn’t there. But I was. I was there and he was there, completely aware.
He pulled his arm from beneath the blanket and gripped Granny’s hand, turned to her and said, “The bad penny always returns, eh Ethel?”
Granny looked at me and shook her head, her eyes pleading.
I turned and walked out.
That evening a series of strokes took him and in the morning my mom drove Eric to the Greyhound station. I stayed in Corvallis and wore the brown suit I’d buried my dad in, the brown suit I later wore in my senior class pictures. I wore that suit for the very last time.
Three years before, we had tried to dig a well together. This was before my dad died. It was him, and me, and Grandad, hand-digging a well, so we wouldn’t have to pay the son-of-a-bitching county through the nose for water for the lawn. He loved that lawn. It was at least four inches thick and so green that it looked blue, and when you stepped on it, when he wasn’t looking, it took your footprint like a carpet of crushed-velvet moss in the deepest of old man forests. He let me mow it for him once with the Snapper, when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I fucked it up so bad it took nearly a year for the yellow circles where I’d let the blade spin for just a second too long to go all the way back to crushed velvet of the darkest blue-green. Him and me and my Dad out there hand-digging a well through Missoula-Flood Willamette Valley clay, with rented equipment.
Hand-digging a well is a lot like post-holing for fence posts, only you keep going in the same hole over and over again. There’s a chain attached to the blades of the digging apparatus and you add extensions to the handle as you feed it into the hole, until you hit the clay way down at the bottom. You ram the blades in as deep as you can from all the way up at the surface, then yank on the chain to pull the blades together, and then hand-over-hand drag the load all the way back, dump it, and start over again. We started shortly after dawn each day, trying to maximize the cool of the morning. My Dad, thirty-six-years-old and pushing four-hundred-fifty pounds would usually crap out about halfway through the afternoon. Grandad and I would keep at it until supper and then get back at it while the light was good. By the end of the third day, my back was killing me. The hole was maybe twelve inches across, but we had dug through more than seventy-five feet of clay and just enough clay mixed with loose rock to give us hope.
It was full twilight when we pulled the last load up together. I told Grandad that I was hitting the showers and he grunted something under his breath and started feeding the digger back into the hole. Seventy-years-old, six-foot-three, two-hundred-thirty pounds, pencil thin mustache, filthy wife-beater, boots, green trousers, brown belt, burning assless Camel jammed in the corner of his mouth, square, gold-rimmed glasses, the few remaining hairs plastered back against his skull, abandoned by both his son-in-law and his only grandson to finish digging the hole himself.
I passed my dad in his usual spot on the couch, asleep, watching the TV. He roused and asked me how it was going out there. I told him that Grandad was still at it, but that I was hitting the showers. He sighed, leveraged himself out of the couch with the arm of the thing and stomped off toward the backyard.
When I came out the shower they were shouting for everyone to come out, “Come quick!”
There in a small pile, next to the hole, next to the massive pile of clay that we’d let accumulate after my dad had called it quits in the late afternoon, was a quantity of wet rock. They were slapping each other on the back. We’d done it. And just to prove it, we ran the digger down again, the three of us and pulled up another small load of glistening gravel.
We went to bed exhausted, but happy with each other, with ourselves.
In the morning the hole had caved in. I helped my Grandad load the rented equipment and drag it back to the rental place. The two of us never tried to do anything again.
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