Coffee Cans and Blood

When the phone rings, I’m sitting at my desk at home, staring out at the pool, nursing a hangover. The bank foreclosed on my house a few months ago. As the day of the public auction draws near, I try to imagine a crowd of people in my driveway. I wonder if my neighbors will be there.

Head pounding, I consider letting the phone ring, but the insistence of the thing is unbearable. I snatch it from its cradle.

“Yes!”

“Hi, Leith. How are you?”

It’s my father. He’s trying to sound casual, like we’re old pals. We are not old pals. I haven’t seen the man in years. He abandoned the family when I was a kid, and I’ve had little to do with him since.

I tell him I’m fine, which I am not.

“Is there anyone in the room with you?” he says.

Odd question.

“No,” I say.

“Is there anyone one else on the line?”

“No.”

There’s a pause. Then, in a quavering voice, my father says, “They come with coffee cans and try to steal my blood.”

I couldn’t have heard that right. Probably because I’ve already tuned him out. For decades I’ve been doing that—making him disappear. I lean back in my chair, imagine I’m somewhere else.

“Leith?” my father says.

I’m on a beach in Martinique. Cool blue water. Fine white sand. Frosty Pina Colada and . . .

Something jolts me back into the room. What did he just say?

“Did you say something? Dad?”

“Yeah, I did,” he says.

He sounds scared, but that can’t be right either. My father is as tough as an oak plank. He’s not afraid of anything. Least of all, me.

I hold the phone tighter to my ear, as if this will help me to better understand him. Then he says that thing again about the blood, and my jaws grind again.

“Every time I get a haircut, men in black suits come into the barber shop with coffee cans and try to steal my blood.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad. What the hell are you talking about?”

My father is an intelligent man with a sharp mind. He doesn’t say nonsensical things. Maybe it’s my hangover. Or maybe it’s the beginning of a joke. My dad, always the prankster.

“Leith. I’m trying to . . . uh . . . figure this out. There’s something wrong.” His desperation clutches at me.

Why is my father reaching out to me? He knows I stopped caring when he blew up the family.

“I miss you,” he says. His voice is tender, heart-rending.

I’m stunned. My father is seventy-four years old. This is the first time in forty years he’s said anything so intimate. No matter how I feel about him, I have to respond to it. “I miss you too,” I say. But I don’t.

He coughs. It sounds as if something is lodged in his throat. Then I quickly realize, he’s not clearing his airway, he’s crying.

I grip the phone so hard my hand hurts.

He goes on, “They expect so much of me. They give me these stale sandwiches. What am I supposed to do with them?” Now he’s pleading. “I keep telling you and telling you and telling you! You’ve got to get me out of here!”

“Dad. I . . .”

“Did you know they make me share my room with a black man? When they take me for my bath, that son-of-a-bitch steals my money! You know how they are.”

I can’t believe my ears. I’ve never heard my father say anything like this.

“Leith,” he says.

I hold my breath.

“How can you tell if anything in this life is really happening, or if the whole thing is just something you made up in your mind? You’ve got to get down here! You’ve got to get me out of here! Leith. Leith? DO YOU HEAR ME!”

“Yes, Dad. I hear you. I’ll come to see you. And I promise I won’t spit in your Coke.”

It’s an old family joke, but it doesn’t work. I hear him sobbing. Then the sobbing turns into a sickening chuckle.

* * *

The sun beats on the single-level building. Its paint is so faded I can’t imagine its original color. The parking lot is crushed stone. There isn’t a tree in sight. Two bushes flank the door marked Office. Their branches are spindly and their leaves are brown, like they haven’t had water in months. I hadn’t expected a country club, but this absurdly named “nursing home”—Sunset Arms—looks like a motel that rents rooms by the hour. The whole place reeks of sadness.

As I pull into the parking lot my apprehension grows. My sister, Sabra, and I have come in separate cars. I’m alone in my rental because, as always, I must be free to leave whenever I want to.

Sabra sits in her Volvo, motor running, a/c cranked so high her hair is fluttering. She glances through her window at me. Shuts the car off, steps out. My little sister. Nine years the younger. Thin, worried. We haven’t seen each other in three years. Almost a foot shorter, she reaches up and hugs me hard. I try to return the hug, but my arms feel like lead.

Sabra seems unaware of my awkwardness. She steps back and looks up. “Good to see you, big brother. I’m glad you’re finally got here.”

When we step through the front door, I expect to feel the shock of frigid air pumped by machines running full tilt—you know, typical Florida. But the air is only marginally cool and it’s laden with moisture. Even worse, the smell of urine is so powerful, I take a step back.

My father receives only meager VA benefits and no one in our family can afford to supplement them. For some years now, Sabra has been looking after Dad. I can see the toll it’s taken on her. This place was the best she could find, yet she’s embarrassed about him having to stay here. I should hug her for all she’s done. I don’t.

I feel a rush of anger. Isn’t there someone who can help him?

The woman behind the counter is obese. Her hair is unkempt, and her skin is greasy. Sabra waits patiently while the woman stares into a sheaf of papers propped open on the desk before her. She should say something. I’ll be with you in a moment. Anything. Instead, she chooses to ignore my sister.

The deplorable condition of this place. This ill-mannered receptionist. I’m starting to cook. My fury is building.

Sabra says nothing to the receptionist. That’s her way. It’s not mine. I want to step in front of my kid sister and read the riot act to this rude woman who’s purposefully ignoring us. Over the years, thanks to a temper that can turn violent, I’ve been an embarrassment to many people—my mother, my sisters, my friends, myself—but today I choose not to be a jerk.

The woman signs us in.

We head down a wide corridor. Sabra whispers that Dad’s room is the last one on the left. This makes me think of the horror movie, The Last House on the Left. It’s such an inappropriate connection, I feel addle-brained and foolish.

The carpet underfoot is commercial grade, a course weave built to withstand wear. A sickly-sweet odor rises around us—antiseptics, mold, unwashed bodies, and that overbearing stink of urine.

Sabra stops. She points in the direction of Dad’s room and again whispers, “Dad has a roommate who sleeps most of the time. But the woman at the desk said the man’s gone to the cafeteria.”

“Okay,” I say. “So, what’s up with the roommate?”

As a kid, I spent every free moment playing games with Sabra, doing my best to distract us from the disintegration of our family. I know her. I know she’s afraid right now. But of the roommate?

She speaks so softly I can barely hear her. “The man who shares Dad’s room is black.”

I’m swept back to the coffee cans and blood conversation—to what Dad said about the roommate. As I look at Sabra, her fear expands and she averts my gaze.

An uncomfortable few seconds’ pass. Then Sabra sighs. “Dad’s been saying that the man is stealing things from him. He keeps asking to be moved. He’s very upset that he has to share his room with a black man. But . . .” Sabra looks down at the disgusting rug. “Dad doesn’t call him that. Black, I mean. He calls him a . . .”

She stops. I already know what she’s going to say.

“He calls him the N-word.”

I know Sabra would not fabricate such a thing, but that’s just not possible. “I don’t believe it,” I say.

“Dad has dementia,” Sabra sounds like she’s apologizing for him. And she’s on the verge of tears.

Dementia. This is the first time it’s been said out loud. Now I get it. Ever since “coffee cans and blood”, I’ve feared Dad was losing his mind. And because all of us in the family excel at denial, none of us possess the skills to deal openly and directly with problems. As such, no one has had the courage to talk about what’s really going on with Dad.

At the thought of this, my chest constricts. Suddenly, I can’t get enough air.

My emotions are all over the place. In one moment, I feel my father’s fists pounding into my twelve-year-old body as I sleep; then it’s five years later and he’s escorting a strange woman into the house, introducing her to me as “the new Mrs. MacArthur”.

Decades have passed. Despite Dad’s egregious offenses, I’d like to make up for my years of animus toward him by offering some kind of assistance. But within seconds, the humiliation and anger comes flooding back so fast, I want to get as far away from him and the wreckage of his life as I can.

Before this day, I hadn’t given my father’s living conditions a thought. During any number of phone calls, whenever Sabra mentioned her difficulties finding decent care for him, I listened but I did not hear. Now, after having withheld the urge to blast the rude receptionist out of her socks, I feel the protector in me stepping forth. It is in this awful place that my father eats, sleeps, and dreams. It is here that he’s treated poorly. I have to do something.

I detest him, but he is my father,

So many feelings course through me: anger at Dad for screwing up our lives; frustration, because the collapsing arc of his life now demands my attention; revulsion, that this stinking dump may be his last stop. And the sadness. I cannot imagine what it must feel like for him to realize that his once promising life has come to this.

All right. I get it. Dad has dementia. But what does that have to do with him contorting his own moral standards—using the N-word? Does it matter that dementia has jumbled his thoughts? Did the N-word get caught in a log jam of words and just innocently tumble out of his mouth with all the rest? But if my father never had racist thoughts, how could racist words get caught up in anything?

“Where could those thoughts have come from?” I say.

I meant it as a rhetorical question, but Sabra responds, “I have no idea. I’ve never heard him say anything like that before. Not even in the last few months before he went to the VA hospital when he was really confused. He never said anything that would . . .” Sabra’s voice cracks. She turns away from me again.

This is such a horrible subject. Notwithstanding my anger at my father’s self-indulgent behaviors, this disturbing information threatens to collapse the foundation of the few positive beliefs I’ve had about him. How do I process the idea that my father may have been a closet racist?

We arrive at the end of the hall. The last room on the left.

The door is open. Looking into the sparsely furnished room, I’m reminded of the barracks in a military institution. Two single beds along the right wall, ten feet apart, both made up and empty. A flimsy privacy partition in between. Small dresser near each bed. Cheap wooden chairs in the corners.

An air conditioner dangles cockeyed from a single window in the far wall, rattling out barely cooled air.

The left wall is blank but for a single print—a beach scene with palm trees and crashing surf—an insult. A closed door in each left corner—I’m guessing one is a closet, the other a bathroom.

On the tops of the dressers, only a few items. A half-crushed tissue box, several magazines, some empty pill bottles, and a dirty glass smudged with fingerprints with a little filmy water in it.

A blanket of depression drops over me. This is where my father has come to die.

Moving into the room, I hear something behind one of the closed doors. My father must be in the bathroom.

I almost missed the old man sitting in the wheelchair in the far corner, partly because of the partition, mostly because he’s so small. My father’s roommate, back from the cafeteria. His dark, wrinkled skin has faded to a mottled gray. I walk over to a chair that’s close to him and I sit. I want to find out if this man is really someone my father would dislike.

Sabra seems stuck in the doorway. I think she’s afraid to come into the room.

No one says anything. I feel remarkably uncomfortable. What do I ask this man? Excuse me, sir. Has my father ever called you a n_____?

The old man looks to be in his nineties and he’s extremely frail. His clothes are too big for his body; both shirt and pants are rumpled and stained. His deeply wrinkled hands are crossed over his lap. The fingers alternately tremble and twitch. I see now that his eyes are closed.

Cinched around his thin waist, a wide leather strap keeps him from falling out of his chair.

How could this emaciated creature be a problem for my father?

A wellspring of compassion floods through me. This man is someone’s son, brother, father, friend. No matter what he may have done in his life, he shouldn’t have to waste away in a room like this, strapped to a chair.

And what of Dad? I tell myself I should hold onto these feelings of compassion and share them with him when he comes out of the bathroom.

While we wait, I study the old guy. His lips move for a few seconds then stop. Then his head nods. When the nodding stops, his lips move again. The pacing suggests he’s having a conversation with someone in his head.

Just as I’m marveling at the depth of the wrinkles in the man’s leathery skin, his eyes snap open. Without thinking, I say, “Hello.”

But the man isn’t looking at me. He’s looking through me.

I glance over at Sabra. Something strange is happening to her face. When I turn back, the old guy is looking directly into my eyes.

“Hello,” I say again.

“Hello,” he says, his head nodding once. “Did you come here to give me my check? Don’t fool around with me. I know people.” His voice is weak, but I’m able to hear traces of what he might have sounded like as a younger man.

“No,” I say. “I’m just here to visit my father.”

The old man’s head tilts slightly down, his hooded eyes showing distrust. I get the sense the guy was once a force. “Who is he?” he says.

“Lester MacArthur is my father,” I say. “He’s your roommate.”

“Lester is . . . Humph. They try to make you think they don’t know anything. But you listen carefully to me, young man. They know everything!” As his scratchy voice gains power, his anger pushes through. “You gotta watch ‘em like hawks! You gotta watch ‘em like God-damned hawks!”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “But I don’t know what you mean.” I feel disembodied, as if my soul has exited the room and left my body behind.

“I’ll tell you this much, young man. You should have seen what I’ve seen. There’s always something that these . . .” The old man pauses. His eyes narrow, and the skin over his nose pinches into a deep frown. “Hey, young man. Do you know what I say? I say, that voice sounds familiar.”

I want to ask, What voice? but I’ve heard enough to know it’s pointless.

The old man hesitates again, then looks at me hard, as if he’s trying to decide if he should take me into his confidence.

I’m fascinated by him. His eyes are almost colorless and they weep a milky fluid. His skin is covered with brown blotches. No more than twenty strands of wild, white hair sprout from his flaking scalp. Little tufts of beard stick out here and there—some nurse’s aide has done a piss-poor job of shaving him. Collapsed by gravity and time, his face looks ruined, the skin hanging loose like it would slide right off the bones.

In my judgments, I’ve been looking for something negative about the guy, based solely on my sister’s statements. She has said that our father doesn’t trust this man, that he has wronged Dad in some way. But I don’t see how that could be.

The more aware I am of my own unkindness, the deeper my pity for the roommate. What if I were strapped into a wheelchair, dressed and undressed, shaved and washed, every aspect of my life controlled?

He interrupts my reverie. “There was a time, you know, when I could tell you where you came from and whether or not you could carry a tune, just by the sound of your voice.”

A hot knife rips into my gut.

The old man’s eyes lock onto mine. “You’re not the orderly.”

“No, sir, I am not.” My mouth goes dry. My hands begin to shake. “I’m here to visit my father.”

The man abruptly jerks his head as if he’s heard something. He looks left, right, then back at me, ancient eyes boring into my viscera. He raises his right hand and points a shaking finger at me. “You!”

Too weak to stay up, his arm falls onto his thigh with a slapping sound.

The knife in my gut is tearing sideways.

“You,” he whispers.

“What’s your name?” I whisper back.

The man cocks his head. “It’s hell in here,” he says. “The food is bad, the air is foul, and you can’t trust anyone. No man should have to live like this.”

My insides are turning to mush.

“Do you work here?” he says. “You certainly don’t live here. What’s your name?”

“I’m just a visitor.” My voice is its own betrayal. “My name is. . . Leith.”

Again, the old man cocks his head as if trying to locate a sound. Suddenly he braces, his body tight as a wire “You!” he shouts again. “Your voice. It’s YOU!”

I grip the arms of the chair. The floor is dropping out from under me.

“YOU!” he shouts a third time. “Your voice, it’s . . .”

The knife in my gut is turning white hot.

I try to speak but nothing comes out.

The man’s expression is fierce, but there’s something else in it, like he’s seeing a ghost.

And then . . . the whole horrible thing unravels . . .

Sabra is stepping into the room and saying something as the old man is crying and saying something else. “Your voice is like my son’s,” he’s saying, and his lips are trembling and he’s moaning.

It’s a pitiful moan that starts low in his bowels and rises up through his body and pours out of the cave in his face and grows and expands and grows until its tenor is a cry that’s filling up the room.

Then it rises to a shriek.

My eyes water. My skin crawls. I can’t breathe . . .

Sabra is moving toward me in slow motion.

Dear God!

The old man rocks back and forth. The his shriek is stifled like a genie stuffed back in the bottle and he’s moaning again and his tears are running all over the furrows and cracks in his wretched face. This man is a mortally wounded animal.

This man is my father.

How can this be? How could I not have known it was him?

Now I’m the one rocking back and forth. I’m clutching at my stomach, unable to stop it. The pain, the pain, the horrendous roaring pain.

My father’s scrawny arms reach for me. He makes another sound—an ungodly cry that saturates the room in anguish.

I spill onto my knees in front of the wheelchair and lean into my father’s body. Wrapping my arms around his wasted shoulders, I hold him to me. With stick-thin arms, he hugs me as if he is the child. I hear his breath wheeze and his heart pump. I hear his soul, wracking in and out with its sorrow and its grief.

After a while it goes quiet. There is a shifting, and I can feel it changing the room. Powerful and clean, love is radiating throughout the ether, gently soothing our shared our silent suffering.

My rage. It is no more.

I’m so open to the love that I’m astonished. It took not knowing who this man was for my heart to finally yield.

Decades of sadness leach from me and evaporate into thin air. I no longer have the need to hear my father apologize for the mistakes that he’s made. The only thing that matters now is this moment, this love. I’m blessed by it. Healed by it.

After forty years of anger and emptiness, I want to spend as much time with my father as I can. I believe I’ve just learned that the adage is wrong: Time doesn’t heal. Love does.