from Negative Capability issue number one;
Detroit
“Two men lost at sea, in a lifeboat,” he began telling his favourite joke, supporting himself on the thick arm of his recliner as he leaned in my direction.
“One says to the other ‘What should we do?’ So the other one sez ‘Well it’s looking pretty grim. I think we should do what we do in church.’”
Here he paused for effect. “So the other one took off his hat and passed it to him.” He erupted in wheezy laughter.
“He passed the hat!” he repeated the punchline, still laughing.
I groaned and rustled the newspaper.
“Turn it up,” he said, nodding towards the television, its volume already as high as it could go.
I lowered the paper long enough to watch a sports commentator deliver a brash opinion as statistics slid by beneath him. He stopped, and suddenly a red half ton truck was driving up the side of a mountain.
“All that crap,” Lester said, waving his hand dismissively at the TV before looking out the window.
Lester slept in the dining room on an adjustable bed rented from the medical supply store. I lived upstairs, in my childhood bedroom. Since I was done high school but didn’t yet have a job, I helped him those rare days that my mother had to leave the house.
“I think I gotta . . .” he said, a few minutes after the sports show had resumed.
I put down the paper and walked over to him. First I bent down and then, with his arms around my neck, I slowly lifted him out of the blue easy chair. He leaned on me as we walked across the living room’s dusty rug and into the kitchen, around the breakfast table and then into the small adjacent washroom. I always took care to support his left side, the one the stroke took. Placing him on the plastic booster seat he unfailingly thanked me for my gentleness.
Leaning on the kitchen counter I heard his farts resound like gunfire; the toilet bowl amplifying them. When I started helping him to the bathroom I remember being annoyed the first time I lifted him up and noticed that the toilet bowl was clear. “It was just gas,” he told me, with no small amount of guilt in his voice.
After it happened again I began to sympathize, and fear the day that I too would be unable to distinguish between the need to shit and fart.
“Ready!” he called.
I opened the bathroom door and bowed. With his arms again around my neck, I slowly lifted him off the seat, pulling up his grey sweat pants in one swift tug. Leaning him against the counter I let the water warm before squirting liquid soap into his hands, waiting to lead him back to the living room.
The living room air was stuffy. For as long as I could remember my mother and grandmother had spent their afternoons here enumerating a census of family and friends who had fallen victim to a medical dictionary’s worth of ailments, each one horribly distinct and distinctly horrible. Over tea and pink wafer cookies they sat where my grandfather and I sat now and discussed the details, the brass tacks of death. Some suffered on for years while others succumbed to the abyss in a moment.
One day I sat with them, bored and trying to watch The Simpsons on low volume, when my mother declared “In my sleep, with no pain! That’s how I wanna go! Fast and easy!”
“Mom!”
“It’s true! We’ve all gotta go sometime.”
I rolled my eyes. No one I knew could ever actually die.
Lester was not immune to this obsession with mortality. After his stroke he read the obits every day, as he said, “to see that my name’s not listed. Then I know I’m alive.” But as the months and years of his depleted state dragged on he stopped make this habitual joke entirely—as if he had seen his name and was now debating whether or not to alert the authorities to their oversight.
“Let’s go out,” I said when I noticed the sun had broken through the March clouds.
“I don’t know,” he said. The television was still blaring, but instead he watched the movements of the backyard through the sliding door next to his La-Z-Boy. In the months since moving in he had observed the yard as it turned from grass to snow. Now it was both: a brown thatch and few stubborn patches of snow in the shadow of the cedars. “It’ll be cold,” he offered, as an excuse.
“C’mon.”
“Alright,” he sighed.
I wanted to open his life up to a little chance. Adventure. I got his purple bomber jacket, scarf and wool cap from the closet and wrapped him up. Then I opened the garage door and locked the wheels of the wheelchair and placed it outside the door. I put on his velcro outside shoes, grabbed a blanket for his legs, threw on my own jacket and shoes and then hobbled him out the door.
“Easy now,” he said as I pushed him down the incline of the driveway.
“Don’t worry,”
“Luba’s car’s gone,” he said of the neighbour across the street. Lester began noticing things.
“She’s probably volunteering at the museum today.”
He nodded.
Up at the street corner a woman jogged past with a chocolate lab beside her. I watched his head turn, following them as they ran.
I took him out in the wheelchair when the weather was mild and the roads clear. The suburb I grew up in was, for me, perhaps the least interesting place on the face of the earth but still I wanted to make it sing for the old man. With every flower in a front garden, barking dog, piece of street refuse I tried to stir his own memory of all the flowers, dogs and garbage he had known. I tried to engage him in the drama of life outside, beyond the opera of his failing body.
A block away, the park was mud and unmelted snow, but the grey concrete paths were open. Children in snowsuits swung on the swingset while a mother watched indifferently from a bench.
I rolled his wheelchair next to a bench, locked the wheels, and sat down. When he was my age Lester was already working on the line of Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit. That was at the beginning of his life, before he moved North to mine gold and years before he started a union, striked, was crushed and moved back to his hometown, which is my hometown, with his family. I knew that part, roughly. But what happened in Detroit?
“Not much. Worked. It was the biggest plant in the world,” he said once when I asked him.
Today he remembered Shelly Brown, my former neighbour and childhood playmate.
“Did I ever tell you about Shelley?” he asked. I nodded, but he continued.
One year Lester was asked to dress up as Santa Claus and visit a class of second grade students at the elementary school near his house.
“So I put on the costume and I’m a ‘ho-ho-ho’in’ and then I notice out of the corner of my eye, there’s Shelly. But I think no, she can’t recognize me in this outfit.
He smiled. “And then after I gave my little speech about being good and not asking for too much its time for the kids to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what they want. And along comes Shelly, one of the last of them. And then she leans in real close and says ‘Hello Santa,’ and then whispers ‘How’s Nipper?’”
He laughed and laughed. Nipper was the little mutt that he followed around the neighbourhood for years.
I laughed, not with the childish glee I did the first time I heard the story many years before. But today it was actually kind of funny.
My grandfather wiped a tear of joy from his eye.
“Wasn’t that smart? She knew it was me, but she didn’t want to give me away.”
