It was going to be a weekend of fire. First and foremost, I was having my usual gathering on Friday night and had decided that it would be really cool to burn all the old phone books taking up space in the old telephone table that doubles as a night stand in my spare room. My fire pit is not a real fire pit, but a screened-in, smallish, driveway affair that I use, ironically, in my driveway. My friend Ben suggested that I wait until Saturday, when Mike and Gwen were having a fire night at their house. Their pit is open, big, and ripe for phonebookery.
The plan was originally to use them to supplement the lack of decent-sized firewood I have at the house. What do I know about burning of phone books? Sure, I should be green and recycle them, but I thought returning them to their base elements via flame would be more fun. Besides, I thought I had tapped Dad all out of firewood over the last few months.
A day or so later (I think it might have been Wednesday), I found out that Dad had contracted pneumonia again (on top of his lung cancer) and his doctor had told him that, if he didn't feel better by Sunday, he would wind up back in the hospital. This, I knew, would force him to get better. He has a severe hatred of hospitals and I have a severe hatred of going to visit him there.
There is a fine line that I have to walk with Dad. He hates to be babied and bothered and gets annoyed if you call him too much...so I make Sarah do it. She had reported on Thursday that Dad was indeed feeling quite a bit better and so I elected not to call. Friday morning, I had waited long enough. It was about ten-thirty and I hadn't heard from her so I called him from work.
“I'm a little better than yesterday, still looking up. I'll live, son”
A wash of relief rolled over me as it did every time I made sure he was okay. I was elated and emboldened enough to ask him if he still had any more firewood. He informed me that there was quite a bit of older stuff stashed in the barn and that I was welcome to come get it all after work. This was my excuse to go see him, though I was always uncomfortable being there when he was sick. I told him I would rush in, grab the wood, say “hello” and bolt. I also warned him that he was not to help me get it or load it or even leave his chair.
This would be perfect. I could see him, solve my wood problem, and get out quickly. Selfishness and the desire to hang out and drink with my friends prevailed and I did exactly what I said I would do.
“...and keep feeling better,” I said as I was leaving, “I'm gonna be too damned busy to be visiting you in the hospital. Don't you dare ruin my weekend.” This was met with a chuckle as Dad and I have similar senses of humor. I took the wood home and partied like it was 1999 (which was over ten years ago and I'm not sure I partied all that hard back then).
I'm not sure why I didn't feel all that good the next morning, but I suffered through it in anticipation of a quiet evening at Mike and Gwen's. I bagged up all the phone books, hit the drive-through, and made my way to the next fire just as it was getting dark.
I came with all my standard battle loadout; armed with a folding cloth chair, a twelve-pack of Aldi's diet cola (yeah, I know), a partial bottle of rum in case my mood changed, and the shopping bag full of phone books.
I spent the next couple of hours drinking can after can of diet cola (can't imagine why I was so dehydrated) and joking tiredly with my friends. I had no energy and was wishing for something to perk me up.
I decided that it was now time for the phone book sacrifice. I flopped a smaller one into the flames and was rather disappointed to find that they don't burn very well. They seem to just smolder, shoot off tons of ash, and just lay there. We all expected more and decided that they were not at all entertaining... until the pages started turning themselves in the heat. Now that part of it was really cool, but soon it got old and I sat back down in the chair and opened up yet another can of the substance that was feebly trying to suggest that it was diet cola.
The sound of a Star Trek photon torpedo suddenly erupted in my shorts pocket.
“Oh shit,” I said, “that's Dad's ring tone!” I glanced at my watch... it was 10:30. Far too late for a mundane call.
“Hello!” I'm sure my voice betrayed fear already.
“Mr. Manns?” It was not Dad's voice.
“Um...yes?”
“This is the [city we both live in] police department. We're here with Paul Manns.” I don't remember what, if anything, I responded with. Probably silence. “Are you related to him?”
A million thoughts raced around my head and time slowed down. The flames of Mike's fire danced hauntingly in front of me in slow-motion. Everyone around the fire stared at me, completely frozen in worry.
“Yes, I'm his son.”
“I found your number in his cell phone. We responded to a 911 call and had to force entry into the house. He was non-responsive; we're transporting him to [hospital I have been at too much] once he's stabilized.”
“What's wrong with him?! What's it look like?!”
“All I know, sir, is that he doesn't look good.” The rest of the conversation, if there was one, is lost in the black hole of my memories. I stood up and started folding my chair to leave and briefly explained what was happening.
“I think this might be it, people,” I said, trying to challenge the powers that be to prove me wrong. When you're a pessimist, you're only ever pleasantly surprised.
“Don't say that,” someone said.
“Just go,” Mike snapped at me, “I'll bring your stuff back tomorrow.”
“Call us when you find out something,” said my friend Tiffany, who had been Dad's verbal sparring partner for years. She always said she loved the “Old Goat.”
In the next blink, I was driving at terribly unsafe speeds towards home. I tried to call Sarah repeatedly and was getting panicky and very angry at the same time. She always leaves her stupid phone in her purse on the opposite end of the house and I have repeatedly told her that she needs to have it with her in case of an emergency. This was definitely one of them, and she had not listened.
I called Mechele in my panic and told her what was happening.
“No! That can't be! I just left him! He was fine!”
“This is what the cops tell me and it was definitely his phone they called me on!”
“I'm on my way up to the hospital. Stop by your dad's house and make sure it's secure. They probably broke the front door getting to him.”
“I have to stop and get Sarah first... she isn't answering her [expletive deleted] phone again!”
“Alright. Get her and get to his house. The police are probably still there.”
I flew into my driveway like you see in movies and leapt out of the car without turning it off or shutting the door, thumbing the garage door opener button on my way out. Sprinting into the house, I called down to the computer room breathlessly.
“Sarah, are you dressed?”
“Yes, why?”
“We gotta go. It's Dad!”
As we raced toward Dad's house (a very stupid, panicked decision looking back on it), Mechele called me from the hospital. They told her he had had a heart attack and they would not let her back to see him. I should probably come straight to the emergency room.
They won't let her back to see him? He has to not be conscious, because he knows that she is always the first to arrive when he has a problem and he tells the nurses to let her back. God, this can't be good.
This is it, I thought once again.
“Don't say that,” said Sarah. I must have thought it out loud. Sarah is one of those people who believes that if you say something, it comes true.
This is it. This time I kept it quiet.
I hate it when I'm right. I got to the ER and found Don, Mechele's husband waiting for me as she was already in “that little room” at the hospital that is cheerily decorated where they drop the bombs on family and friends. They never used the words “he didn't make it” or “he's gone;” they simply said they had “stopped working on him at the moment.” At first, in my denial, I didn't understand the meaning of those words.
They told me that the doctor would be in to talk to us. By this time, my aunt and uncle (Dad's brother and his wife) had arrived and someone had already dropped the bomb on them. We sat in stunned silence while one of the nurses (who was very practiced at this job, unfortunately) patiently waited with us. Mechele cried a bit on my shoulder but the truth hadn't quite reached me yet. I was in a haze of disbelief.
Suddenly, the truth hit me like an errant Mack truck when they asked me what funeral home I wanted the body shipped to. Why were they asking me? Oh, wait...I'm the sole survivor now. All of it falls to me! I have to make decisions.
I was (and am still) not enjoying making all the decisions the week of the funeral, but I took it all with the numbness of shock that I was surprised to experience and really rather enjoyed my time visiting family and friends. I told everyone that I was aware of the numbness and that I would surely “crash and burn” when everything was over. My aunt and uncle from Florida (my late mother's brother) had come up and traveled with me for the out-of-state part of the proceedings and stayed with me for that week and it was very appreciated. Their advice to me was indespensable.
I had asked all my friends to just come over to Dad's the Saturday that we got back and just hang out with me for a while. Mike brought over the stuff I had left at his house a week earlier and, against my better judgment, I hit that bottle of rum that was still in the bag with my other junk. We had fun and carried on and it was a great release...for a while.
I made the mistake, after the friends had gone, of sitting in “his chair.” In the quiet of the post-revelry and with the inhibitions of the alcohol, I crashed and burned...pretty hard.
Here it is just a few weeks later and, Monday evening, I finally put that bag of phone books out to the curb along with the clothes that Dad had changed out of the last evening of his life. The tree-lawn in front of Dad's house (okay..my ancestral home..my new home) was pretty full already from the shed-cleaning (see previous post) and the phone books and clothes were the final remnants of the horror that was that fiery night in September when the worst thing on my mind was how tired I was and how disappointing the burning phone books had been.
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