My morning gets off to its usual start. I wake up.
Masturbate. Eat some bacon and eggs. Drink a cup of creamed
and sugared coffee. Have a frank discussion with my father
about his testicles.
"A vasectomy reversal? Are you kidding me?"
"Oh come on, son. It's not that big of a deal." A
bi–folded pamphlet sits on the table. Dad opens and
reads the pamphlet aloud. " βA small incision is made in
the scrotal skin over the old vasectomy site. The two ends
of the vas deferens are found and freed from the
surrounding scar tissue.' "
He offers me the pamphlet. Something resembling a beat up
three–wood taunts me on page two. I shake my
head. "No, thanks."
"That right there is the vas . . ." Dad runs his finger
along the shaft of the three–wood. He taps once on
the top of the club. "Then you have your epididymis and
your testicle." He points to the three–wood's shaft
one more time. "My vas is currently severed, and they're
going in and sewing it back together, more or less."
I cringe at the thought of Dad's nutsack getting sliced
open. Mom hovers off to the side of the kitchen. She sips
on her coffee in between bites of toast, reluctant to enter
the fray. I don't let her off that easy.
"You put him up to this?"
"Henry, your father and I have been talking about this for
years."
"Oh really?" I cringe at the sound of my given name. I hate
the name Henry. Hank is the only name to which I've
answered for pretty much my entire fifteen years on this
planet, having cast aside "Henry David" and my mother's
literary pretense—she's never even fucking read
Walden—at the precise moment I split her vagina with
my freakishly oversized melon.
Dad sips his coffee. "Yes, really. Besides, if anyone's at
risk, it's your mother, not me."
"Okay then, Mom, why the sudden interest in suicide?"
"Suicide?" Mom shrugs. She's wearing her old cotton
bathrobe and Dad's slippers. She shuffles across the
linoleum floor and sits next to me at the kitchen
table. "They've made a lot of advances in prenatal care
since I had you and your sister."
"They have?"
"Sure."
"Jesus, Mom! Last time I checked, I was born in 1971, not
1871. You had all kinds of problems with me and Jeanine.
And Grandma Louise, what did she have, eight miscarriages
or something?"
"My mother only had three miscarriages."
"Only three? That's a relief. How's that twin sister of
yours doing by the way?" It's a callous reference to the
premature twin my mother never knew. I'm curious as to how
Mom's twin would have turned out. It's hard to picture
anyone else looking back at me with that round,
cherub–like face and its fountain of teased, hair
sprayed, and overly dyed blondish hair. Harder still to
imagine another woman dumb enough to contemplate reentering
a world measured in dirty diapers and ear infections at the
age of forty–one.
But Mom is unwavering.
"Women with much worse track records than mine are having
babies nowadays."
"Worse? Have you looked in the mirror lately?"
"As a matter of fact, I have."
"When's the last time you just went for a walk?"
"Can't recall."
"You can't recall because you don't walk. You don't take
care of yourself."
"Oh, Hank, stop it!" Mom shakes her head, as if merely
denying she's sedentary and bookish might alter reality.
"Stop what?" I reach over and grab her wrist. She's wearing
a gold watch Dad gave her for their fifteenth anniversary
two years ago. I turn her wrist so she can see the face of
the watch. "What time you got? Because I'm looking at
someone's biological clock, and it says about quarter 'til
midnight!"
"Quarter 'til midnight, my ass." Grandpa George throws the
morning newspaper on the table. Although our family has
been in America for close to two hundred years, Grandpa
looks fresh off the boat—a freckled, strawberry blond
Irishman even at age eighty–one. His thick,
Coke–bottle glasses magnify the size of his eyes to
comical proportions. He's more blind than far–sighted
at this point in his life.
Grandpa sips his coffee. "If that goddamn kid throws my
paper in the bushes one more goddamn time . . ."
"Thanks, Dad," Mom says.
"Thanks nothing," Grandpa says. "Boy shouldn't be talking
to his mother like that."
We moved Grandpa into our first floor guest room last year.
Dad said it was the right thing to do. Grandpa had lived
alone since Grandma Eleanor died of cancer in '81, but
sometime after the beginning of Reagan's second term, he
started forgetting things. He'd go out to meet his friends
for breakfast, walking the same route along Kentucky Avenue
on the southwest side of Indianapolis that he'd been
walking for fifty years, and he'd get lost. Kentucky Avenue
was no longer the best place to get lost. The old
neighborhood wasn't safe anymore. His favorite neighborhood
stores—Murphy's Mart, Woolworth's, and Linder's Ice
Cream—had all gone out of business and been replaced
by Mega Liquor World, Instamatic Cash Checking, and
Rent–to–Own Furniture and Appliance Store. The
Laundromat that used to have quarter washes and the machine
that dispensed free popcorn now had ten–dollar
hookers and a machine that dispensed fifty–cent
condoms, and the house across the street that used to leak
puppies and shirtless toddlers now leaked crack addicts and
shirtless adults.
Within months, Dad's selfless act started backfiring.
Incontinence, feebleness, dementia. The other night, I
caught Dad hovering over Grandpa's bed when he slept. I
asked him what he was doing. He told me he was praying for
God to make his father whole again. Dad refuses to
entertain the idea of a nursing home or assisted care
living. Our house has started to reek of urine—the
smell of mortality and a son's well–intentioned but
misguided love.
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