Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [51]
“Jean, thank God.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Your timing is flawless as usual, Jean-Joe. Just flawless. Now, here’s the plan.”
I pulled up a chair.
“Now, have you got a pen on you?”
“Yes.”
“Terrific. They won’t be back for a while. Let me have that pen.”
“I can’t.”
“They just gave me my medicine. The coast is clear.”
“I can’t give you a pen, Dad.”
“What do you mean? Crazy talk. Give me the pen.”
“The nurse said you might hurt yourself.”
“Absolute nonsense. Jean, you can’t imagine what’s going on in the basement.”
“I can’t, Dad. I’m sorry.”
My father looked at me from behind the eyes of insanity. He wanted to write down everything he’d seen. And I would not give him the means to do that. My father and I loved stories. And I was denying him this story—the story of his own insanity. Highly medicated, steroid-induced to be sure. But still, insanity.
“This place is an abortion mill, Jeanne. A Catholic hospital. With a goddamn abortion mill in the basement. I was invited to a party down there last night. A gal from the second floor asked if I’d like to go have a drink. A drink sounded all right after throwing that chair through the window, so I went. They’ve got these enormous black women serving drinks while abortions are being performed. I’ve got to get this down. That’s just the beginning, Jean-Joe.”
Just then my father wiggled his leg and his penis dribbled out of the covers. He didn’t notice. He continued talking about the basement and the colored lights and the dancing. I pulled the blanket over him. My father is a Catholic but he’s a liberal Democrat, pro-choice, so this party in the basement wasn’t some psychedelic representation of his politics. I thought of my friends waiting for me at the restaurant. Carmen and my singer friend Sophia also had charming fathers who struggled to pay their rent and ruined your birthday and talked big. And loved you. Sometimes that was the worst part, seemingly more difficult than the deadbeat dads or the mean dads or the absentee workaholic dads—to have a father who was totally crazy pants who adored you was a special kind of agony.
I told my father once more that I couldn’t give him a pen. He glared at me with his bulging blue eyes. He looked like all the pictures I had seen of his mother. She had the same bulging blue eyes. He had Crazy Kate eyes. The story about Crazy Kate’s later years was that in the hospital toward the end of her life she saw bugs on the walls and demanded martinis from the nurses. He wriggled the oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth, took a few breaths, and then wriggled it off to speak. “I’ll remember this, Jean. I’m going to remember this.”
I walked out of the building and sat on the steps of the first brownstone and cried. I had no idea whether he would ever be normal again, if he ever was normal, if he was now a certifiable madman or if I was just a big fucking baby.
WHEN HIS BREATHING WAS regulated, the “dementia,” which the hospital claimed was due to a bad reaction of a combination of drugs, went away. He left the hospital and went back to his little studio on the corner of Bank and West Fourth Street.
THE NEXT TIME I saw Dad was at the Corner Bistro for Eleanor’s birthday. The Corner Bistro is known for its great cheeseburgers, crowded conviviality, and literary weirdos. It could also be one of the smokiest spots in Manhattan. It had served as my father’s living room since he had moved to West Fourth Street. It had some appeal at first as a place you hung out with your divorced dad: it was lively and noisy and filled with cute young men and old characters, and its burgers were undeniably delicious. But it had its limitations. You couldn’t get a table for a lot of people, a lot of the time you couldn’t get a table at all, you were often sharing one with strangers, which is fun under normal circumstances, but when it’s your birthday