I took my name from my grandfather. Most of what I remember about my grandfather happened in a hospital, but then again much of my childhood happened in a hospital. In fact, even in high school, if you asked me what my favorite food was it probably came from the hospital’s cafeteria; hours old burgers, rested to perfection in tinfoil bags, mounds of curly fries, rehydrogenated broccoli soup. My sister and I once laughed for a good 30 minutes when we discovered a curly fry in the shape of an embryo. We loved curly fries and we loved embryos, but the combination wasn't so hot. And we debated after all the other fries were gone whether we should eat the embryo fry, or save it to show to our mother, the midwife. The mixed feeling of dread and exhilaration I had when I bit the head off the embryo has stayed with me all this time.
My single mother was the head nurse of three women's health units in the largest hospital in our city. My sister and I would sit in the family waiting room or in her pea-sized office with a fine hair of a window listening to the radio that was turned down to near zero, doing homework, or inventing games that didn’t require space or noise.
We were ever aware of the suffering of others and the hardship our exuberance could bring to bear upon their suffering. Even in my mom’s office, which was located in the happiest unit in the hospital, labor and delivery, we were aware that while many families were celebrating a joyous occasion, some families were lamenting a great loss, and still other families were having children that they did not or could not care for.
The room next to my mom’s office was a circumcision room. A closet, really, with a tray much like a gurney, with straps on it. We could hear, over our math problems and the barely audible college radio programming, the screams of young boys, inconsolable screaming, as they were submitted to an ancient and unnecessary surgery with no anesthetic and no mother to hold them.
More than once I walked out of the office to a nurse attending to the smallest human being imaginable, red faced, jaw unhinged, suffering and bleeding and screaming. The doctor would leave while his young body was still tied down and bloody. The nurse would methodically clean, medicate and wrap the baby’s wound. She would talk to him with the confidence and indifference of one who has seen a tragedy play out a million times over. She knew how to get through this with professionalism. More than once I hid my face in a school-issued textbook and cried from the look of absolute horror in those babes' faces.
It was, at times, stifling, but it made us both love the outdoors and we were avid athletes, like my grandfather.
When my grandfather got ill the world changed. My mother, naturally, was the one to take care of him. I found her one night on the toilet, crying. I immediately assumed she was sick, very sick, and hadn’t told us. I ran to her. I began to cry. I pulled her head into my little teenage breast. We stood there like that for some time. And she looked up at me, her blue, crystal clear eyes covered in tears and in a voice I had never heard before, the voice of a 5-year-old, she said, “I am going to be an orphan, now, I will never have a parent, again.”
Oh, how I wanted to tell her I would always take care of her, that I would be her parent, but I couldn’t speak. I knew what she meant, and I realized that no matter how old I got, I too would some day be an orphan and then I would be profoundly and fundamentally alone. (Years later I read the Illiad, "You are father to me and mother, and brother, and husband also. Have pity on me, and stay here upon the wall, lest you leave me a widow and your child an orphan." I sat stunned in class, reduced from college scholar to a babbling, blushing child.)
My sister and I set up shop in my grandfather’s basement. There was a pull-out bed and an old TV with a knob you could turn to get channels. Channel 1 on the dial was the playboy channel, which was scrambled, and when my sister fell asleep I would silently turn it on and watch between the lines of static for the brief moments when one could see naked men with surgically sculpted penises and women with surgically enhanced breasts touching each other.
My grandfather’s health deteriorated and we decided to move into my mother’s childhood home, which was directly across the street from grandpa's then current house. After school we would spend all of our time with my grandpa and my step grandma. We would watch Wheel of Fortune, then Jeopardy. They were impressed with the questions I knew the answers to. I was impressed with the questions they knew the answers to.
We began to tell stories.
My grandfather needed help getting up from his chair, then he needed help walking to the bathroom, and finally he needed help sitting down to pee. His penis had disappeared, as far as I could tell, and he seemed to me like an old woman, and I was embarrassed to have noticed and he was embarrassed to need my help with such things. One time I didn’t move fast enough to help him up. He had been so polite when he asked that I didn’t realize it was urgent. He peed himself and the chair. His chair. I got some soap and water and cleaned his leg and got him fresh pajama pants and then I cleaned the chair.
Later after he went to the hospital I would sit in the chair, it was leather and it smelled like his aftershave. I would touch the chording around the arms with my fingers the way he did when he was thinking and I would fall asleep.
I was a natural at the hospital. I knew where to go to be out of the way and I would sit and watch him while he slept.
He had the most amazing fingers. I would watch them all the time. They had large knuckles, they were tan, and large. The tips were flat as if he had been squeezing something for a great many years. He would pinch his bed sheets as though he was checking to be sure they were still there, then he would pat them smooth again, over and over. He must have done that a million times.
One night when they let him come back home to die, my mom found him crying. It was the first time she had ever seen him cry. He was curled up in his bed. He had had a nightmare. He kept saying, “He is coming, he is coming, don’t let him find me, mom. Don’t let him hurt me.” I knew that my great grandfather was not a nice man. He had gone to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl. But it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have assaulted my grandfather, or that my grandfather had ever been a helpless boy. He was so self-sufficient and he had power, not just because he was a white, male, business owner, but more over because he was good to people. And not just his friends and family, he was good to strangers and to people he didn’t like. It was hard for me to think that even the strongest, kindest man, was once a boy who was alternately loved and tortured. He begged my mom not to leave him, and she slept next to him every night afterwards until he died.
One night he asked me to read to him from a little prayer book his priest had brought him. I opened to a random page and began to read, I wanted to show him what a good reader I was, this was ridiculous, since I was 15 and an excellent reader at that point, but it seemed important, somehow. I read the first paragraph, began the second and stumbled, there in print were all the giant elephants in the room we had politely agreed for all of our lives to ignore.
“I will treat all people with the love of Christ and recognize they are equal in the eyes of the lord, including those who are different from me, men, women, children, people of all races, religions and nationalities, poor and rich . . . “
There was a time, before my grandfather got ill, that he took my sister and I to a Wendy’s for an after school treat. We were sitting at a booth near the windows, and an elderly black gentleman who was roughly the same age as my grandfather, though noticeably less mobile, walked by. He saw my grandfather sitting at the booth with us and he stopped and leaned a hand on the window and lifted an old wooden cane up with his other hand and tapped on the glass. He put his cane back down and tipped his hat, as if to say, “Hey, old-timer, we both made it, we are both still ticking.” My grandfather began fingering the edge of the table, nervously, he looked at us, watching him for a reaction, and he broke down and saluted his new friend, then under his breath he whispered, “You old black python.” The man on the other side of the window motioned towards my sister and me and mouthed the words, “Congratulations on your beautiful grandchildren.”
I stumbled again, trying to decide without him noticing which passages of the prayer were best to skip for this reading. He popped open an eye and took me in. I realized, suddenly, that he might have memorized this prayer by now and that he might know what I was doing and why. I jumped to the last paragraph and read it quickly then excused myself to the bathroom.
When I returned my grandfather was asleep. I brushed his hair and cleaned up the area around his bed. I read the cards on the flowers and the notes. “Thank you for helping me buy my house.” “Thank you for the money you lent me when my husband was ill.” They went on like that.
A nurse came in to empty the bin at the bottom of his bed. There was a tube that went into his chest to his lungs. A steady stream of blood and mucus ran from his lungs down into the bin. We are not sure how he got sick, or what exactly he suffered from. It appears to have been an unusual lung disease. There is a chance it was something he contracted a half a century before when he was in the war or that had developed over time from years of working with inks and paper fiber in his paper box factory. But, it didn’t matter. He was dying.
As I stood beside him I was aware of the greatest tragedies of my mother's life. Her mother had died when she was younger than me and my grandfather, in his bereavement abandoned his children and took refuge in the woman across the street, my step grandmother.
And yet he died with his entire family and all his friends around him. We each spent some time with him alone, a whole house full of people, then we gathered around his bed and locked arms and held each other and him, in silence. The next morning I went to school and my mom gave him the morphine that the hospice nurse had left for him. He went to sleep. She and her two sisters and her two brothers lifted his body and cleaned it and perfumed it. They dressed him in his best suit then called for an ambulance. It bothered me that I wasn’t allowed to be there when he passed, to see him simple and dead before he was embalmed, but I understand why they sent us to school there are some things that are hard enough to handle without questions.
I met so many people at his funeral. The church was packed. There were people waiting outside. A man walked into his wake, with the newspaper in hand, obituaries circled. I was standing at the entrance to the viewing room, too afraid to go inside. This old man walked up to me and said, “Is this old Billy-boy’s funeral?” I said it was and we introduced ourselves. He said, “I was a buddy of your grandfathers way back in his ball playing days. The best pitcher you ever saw. In fact, I was with him the day he met your grandmother, god rest her soul. We were two young and single bachelors and neither of us had a girlfriend. We got some pennies together and went through the phone book calling women’s names, waiting for a young voice. When it was my turn to call, I got your grandmother and I asked her to meet me on the bridge for a walk on Sunday after Mass. Well, your grandfather, that old scoundrel, got there before me, and I saw the two of them walking off together. She should have been mine.” And he went in the room.
I watched him make the rounds telling his stories about my grandfather, the closest thing to a dad I ever had, the nicest man I knew, and the most intolerant. I was overcome with a desire to have everyone know how much he meant to me and how much our relationship was frought with differing viewpoints. My grandfather never knew, for example, that the wife he stole from his buddy and his children were Natve American, he grew up in an era where the Irish were still treated like second-class citizens and given a mock holiday. My grandfather only ever met one of my friends. He liked her instantly, her name was Kim and we were co-captains of the basketball team. Kim was a very nice person, nice to a fault in high school terms. I remember my grandfather telling me after she had left that a person should hold on to a friend like her. Sage advice, that I unfortunately didn't heed. I would like to say I was bigger than this, but the girls on the team started to call us lesbians, despite the fact that Kim had a boyfriend, and, well, I I tried to distance myself from that perception mostly because I was so afraid it was true.
I saw Kim's mom a while back in the building I worked at for few months in my home town. I had returned home to regroup. My family is all pretty much gone from that place now. I drove up to the Catholic cemetary one day. I didn't have a key to the building with my grandfather's coffin is in. I looked in vain for my grandmother's grave, and my step grandmother's grave and my friends' graves and then, finally, I remembered that there were graves there, tiny graves, that belonged to the three brothers my mother had had that didn't make it past infancy. But I didn't find a one of them. In the car I was listening to a poem by Galway Kinnell:
In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth,
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
every one of them for his own good,
a whole continent of red men for living in unnatural community
and at the same time having relations with the land,
one billion species of animals for being sub-human,
and ready to take on the bloodthirsty creatures from the other
planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.
I give my blood fifty parts polystyrene,
twenty-five parts benzene, twenty-five parts good old gasoline,
to the last bomber pilot aloft, that there shall be one acre
in the dull world where the kissing flower may bloom,
which kisses you so long your bones explode under its lips.
My tongue goes to the Secretary of the Dead
to tell the corpses, "I'm sorry, fellows,
the killing was just one of those things
difficult to pre-visualize-like a cow,
say, getting hit by lightning."
My stomach, which has digested
four hundred treaties giving the Indians
eternal right to their land, I give to the Indians,
I throw in my lungs which have spent four hundred years
sucking in good faith on peace pipes.
My soul I leave to the bee
that he may sting it and die, my brain
to the fly, his back the hysterical green color of slime,
that he may suck on it and die, my flesh to the advertising man,
the anti-prostitute, who loathes human flesh for money.
I assign my crooked backbone
to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,
for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood
on his shirt front and who his brother's,
for the race isn't to the swift but to the crooked.
To the last man surviving on earth
I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear
in his long nights of radiation and silence,
so that his eyes can't close, for regret
is like tears seeping through closed eyelids.
I give the emptiness my hand: the pinkie picks no more noses,
slag clings to the black stick of the ring finger,
a bit of flame jets from the tip of the fuck-you finger,
the first finger accuses the heart, which has vanished,
on the thumb stump wisps of smoke ask a ride into the emptiness.
In the Twentieth Century of my nightmare
on earth, I swear on my chromium testicles
to this testament
and last will
of my iron will,
my fear of love, my itch for money, and my
madness.
And I drove home alone, happy my grandfather was equal parts scoundrel, bigot and philathropist, happy that love is as imperfect as we are, happy to be alive in all the complexities of living, and to have known a man, no better or worse than myself, but of a different time and place.
