Home Is Burning (11 page)

Greg started training me to be the assistant helper monkey by teaching me what to do when our dad needed to go to the bathroom. Though he could still walk, getting him up and down was a hassle, so we started using a bedside urinal, which was this disgusting plastic container that looked like a Nalgene water bottle gone horribly wrong.

“Now, you place his penis in the urinal so he can pee,” he said, while placing my dad's penis in the urinal.

“And he's okay with a gay person touching his penis?” I joked.

“Your gay jokes aren't funny anymore, and he doesn't care who touches it at this point,” Greg said.

“So long as it's not an ugly girl,” my dad said. I had already helped him take a shower, so I felt strangely okay helping him pee in bed. My cherry had been popped. I mean, it was still weird as shit, because it was my dad's penis, but it was just something that had to be done. There was no getting around it.

The feedings were next.

“You just take this syringe and stick it into his G-tube. Then you pour in a glass of water, three cans of Promote, then another glass of water,” Greg explained.

“And you just have to watch it go in, all slow like that?” I asked as I watched the yellow goop slowly drain into my dad.

“Yes, you can't fill Daddy up too fast, or he'll pop,” explained Greg. Greg called my dad “Daddy” sarcastically, when he was in goof-around mode.

The hardest part of the new job was the BiPAP machine.

“You have to put the mask on first. Place it over his nose and mouth, and tighten the straps around his head. Then you turn on the machine. Once it's humming, you can swing him into bed,” Greg explained, swinging my dad into bed like a pro. “Then be sure to give Daddy a big kiss on the forehead, and tell him how much you love him,” Greg said, with a little sarcasm. “LOVE YOU SO MUCH, DADDY.”

“Do I have to do the kissing part?” I asked.

“Yes. It's the most important part,” Greg said, planting another kiss on him.

“God, you're so gay,” I said.

“Not funny,” Greg said.

“Dad would laugh, but he's hooked to this fucking machine,” I said.

*   *   *

Greg eventually trained me to do a pretty good job caring for my dad, and we worked together to look after him full-time. But, even though Greg and I had some things under control, we were still sloppy in our handling of this mess. There isn't a manual for this sort of shit. So, we made a lot of mistakes.

One day, we accidentally left him on the BiPAP for three hours while he needed to take a shit. He had no way of letting us know that he needed help, and he couldn't get up on his own, so he shit his pants.

“We've got to figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen again,” I told Greg as I dug shit out of my dad's pants, missing my life in L.A.—the palm trees, the lifestyle; fuck, even the traffic didn't seem so bad. “We've got to get control of this.”

Our stupid solution was to place a cowbell next to his bed, forgetting that he couldn't reach over, grab it, and jingle it like a child on Christmas morning. That obviously didn't work. After the bell, we decided that the best way for him to alert us was to have him kick at the bed when he needed to get up, since he could still move his legs. But his kicks weren't loud enough and wasted a lot of his energy. We're fucking idiots.

Thankfully, our bald across-the-street neighbor, Ralph, stepped in. When we were growing up, Ralph had been one of our mortal enemies, despite the fact that he was the only other non-Mormon in the neighborhood. I was terrified of him. My neighborhood friends Mike and Bob would skateboard in the street right in front of Ralph's house. Ralph hated hearing them out there, so he threw his dog's shit in the road to fuck with them. Mike retaliated by throwing Slurpee cups over his fence into Ralph's backyard. Ralph responded by saving up those Slurpee cups for months and then setting all fifty-something of them at Mike's door as a warm “fuck you.”

Things got really bad with Ralph after one of Mike's friends mooned him as he drove by in his self-made car. (Ralph was an engineer who built things he wanted, like cars.) Ralph swerved into Mike's driveway, got out of the car, and charged toward the ass-flasher, saying, “I'm going to tear your fucking head off and shove it up your ass.” He then asked a simple question to the group while rolling up his sleeves. “You ladies ever get your asses kicked?” We were about fifteen years old at the time, so Ralph had the foresight to back off, maybe picturing the headline
BALD
60
-YEAR-OLD ENGINEER SHOVES
15
-YEAR-OLD'S HEAD UP OWN ASS FOLLOWING MOONING
.

But the incident still scared us. We were so scared, in fact, that we would hide in my backyard and launch water balloons at his house. We even got to the point where we filled the launcher with some of the shit he had tossed on the street and tried shooting it back his way.

But when my dad was diagnosed with ALS, Ralph underwent a transformation. I guess there's good and bad in everyone and tragedy can amplify either. While some will shy away from the challenges tragedy presents (as I did initially), others give a William Wallace–esque scream and charge toward it with whatever weapon they can round up. Ralph was in the latter category. He said, “I don't like many people, but I like your dad.” I mentioned that it's virtually impossible to hate my dad, and he responded by saying, “I know. I tried. I couldn't. He's a good man. Couldn't be a better guy to get this horrible, horrible disease.”

Thankfully, Ralph was a handyman, and though he didn't have any hair, he had a lot of tools. In fact, he had a whole back room in his house full of them. Having only ever used a hammer for killing ants on the sidewalk, I was pretty amazed by both the number of his tools and his ability to use them.

Ralph would help out however he could—all while sporting an angry, judgmental scowl. I complained to Ralph about how my dad couldn't alert us when he needed something, and told him about the bed shitting.

Ralph shook his disappointed head and said, “You guys really don't know what you're doing over there, do you?”

“Not really. There's not a manual for this sort of shit, so we mess up a lot,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard the whole ‘manual' speech from all of you. I think it's just important to use your head, be logical. This stuff isn't that hard,” he said. “He can't be shitting the bed.”

So Ralph built a doorbell for Dad to ring whenever he needed anything, sort of a “Please come help me” button. Genius. It wasn't that fancy, just a doorbell button screwed to a piece of wood that emitted a single, pleasant DING when pressed, but I could spend the rest of my life trying and never make something like that. I can hardly make a fucking sandwich.

We set the doorbell next to my dad's hand, and it worked great. He had enough strength to hit it. It seemed to bring a lot of order to the house. My dad would ring it whenever he needed to get up, then we'd go help him. All Greg and I had to do was sit back and listen for the bell.

*   *   *

Part of the job required that Greg and I watch my dad during the night. The bell made that easier. We'd take listening shifts. We called it “Daddy Duty,” which is also what we called the massive shits he'd take. While on Daddy Duty, listening for the bell was all encompassing. Since my parents' bedroom was on the top floor, hanging out and playing pinball, drinking alone, or watching TV in the basement was not an option. I'd started smoking cigarettes, because that seemed like the right thing to do in this situation and because I'm an absolute moron, but those were out now, too, since we couldn't hear the bell outside.

Once the bell rang, Greg or I would sprint to my dad's bedside. We'd sit him up—which was getting easier and easier since he was losing so much weight—then take the BiPAP mask off. He'd take a second to collect himself, swallowing a couple of times and taking a few deep breaths, before making his request. He'd keep it pretty simple with one-word utterances.

“Pee” meant he had to urinate. We'd grab the bedside urinal, get his cock out, and he'd have a little piss right there and then. We also kept some Kleenex bedside for the wipe up. The urine would be dumped on my sleeping mother. Just kidding. It would go in the toilet with any used Kleenex. We'd flush and wash our hands.

“Bathroom” meant he had to shit. This involved standing him up and helping him walk to the nearby bathroom. We'd usually stay toilet-side and watch him, making small talk about the Utah Jazz or all the cats that were now running around our house. He hated the lack of privacy, but, hey, we hated having to watch our dad shit, so it all balanced out. When he was done he'd say something like, “I'm done,” and we'd wipe him up, pull his boxers back up, smack his ass, and put him back to bed.

“Nose” meant he needed to have his nose wiped. For whatever reason, the BiPAP would always give him a runny nose. Since he was a marathon runner, I'd make jokes like “Your little nose is running a marathon there.” He wouldn't laugh at my shitty joke. We'd grab a Kleenex and he'd blow his nose load into it.

“Up” meant he wanted to get up. This usually was the request issued at the start of the day or if he'd been napping. We would help him get up and go to another part of the house to sit and struggle to breathe.

“Kill me” meant he wanted to die because the pain of slowly losing the ability to move, breathe, and talk was becoming too much. We'd grab the bedside gun and fire a round into his head. Even this loud noise wouldn't wake my mom from her cancer sleep. We'd use the Kleenex to wipe up the blood and remove the fingerprints from the gun.

*   *   *

I got good enough at caring for my dad that I didn't need Greg's help. So, we started divvying up the Daddy Duty so that one of us could have a life on nights off. We were both too tired to activate our social lives, so we'd mainly just hang around the house, lounging and eating leftover lasagna. Whoever wasn't on duty would rub it in.

“What are you up to?” Greg would ask.

“What? I can't hear you because I'm too busy not listening for Dad's stupid doorbell,” I'd say as I reclined on the couch reading the sports section for Utah Jazz news while listening to music, a half-eaten plate of lasagna at my side.

“I just asked you what you're doing,” Greg would say.

“Just relaxing. Reading. Listening to music. Eating lasagna. Not wiping Dad's ass. You?” I'd say.

“I just had to wipe Dad's ass,” Greg would say.

“Bummer. Sucks to be on Daddy Duty tonight,” I'd say while folding up the paper. “If you need me, I'll be in the basement drinking alone and playing pinball. Fuck, I might even sneak outside for a cancer stick,” I'd add.

The nights I was on Daddy Duty were pretty lonely. I wouldn't sleep because I didn't want to fuck up and have him die on me, or worse, have him shit the bed again. I'd find ways to pass the time. And no, that doesn't mean I was masturbating to porn. I actually would have been, but because my desktop computer was in the front dining room, I feared that a neighbor would walk by and wonder if Bob was getting the proper care he needed, only to peer through the front window to see me blasting away at myself.

Instead, I'd usually talk to Abby on the phone. She was still upset with me for not spending time with her out in Berkeley before coming home. Our conversations weren't flowing with the usual ease. It was getting harder and harder to relate to her problems because mine seemed so much more significant. She also didn't seem as sympathetic about the situation as I expected her to be. In fact, it didn't seem like she wanted to talk about it at all. I wasn't sure why. We were struggling.

“I got to the gym and there were no treadmills available. I had to ride the bike,” Abby said.

“Well, my dad's arms don't work, and I had to clean shit off his balls,” I said.

“My neighbors are throwing a party. I might stop by,” Abby said.

“I can't leave the house because I'm on Daddy Duty tonight,” I said.

“I hate bugs,” Abby said.

“I hate terminal illnesses,” I said.

Shit like that. It was really unpleasant for both of us. But we'd always say “I love you” before hanging up, and that's all that really mattered. I figured she'd eventually come around to accepting the situation.

After Abby was off the phone and I was in bed, I'd usually read. Sometimes I'd write. I had written for a comedy magazine in college, so I'd try working on something for them, or I'd write about some of the crazy events happening at home. Sometimes I'd watch a DVD on my computer with one of the earbuds out, so I could still hear that goddamn doorbell. Sometimes I'd listen to the White Stripes—
“I'm thinking about my doorbell. When you gonna ring it? When you gonna ring it?”—
also with one of the earbuds out.

One night, I decided to have a glass of wine and pretend everything was normal. I poured it to the brim and drank it while sitting on a ratty old armchair in my mom and dad's room, watching them sleep as their diseases worked on their bodies, my dad's BiPAP purring along with all the cats. I shook my head. How did things get so fucked up? Why did I have to watch my parents battle terminal illnesses? How is that fair? Is it because my life had been so good up until now? Is it creepy that I'm sitting in their room watching them sleep while sipping on a glass of wine?

I took a giant, delicious sip and closed my eyes. I pictured everything being okay again. The house wasn't under construction. My parents were completely healthy. We didn't have cats pissing and shitting around our house. There was a giant sign that read,
WELCOME HOME DAN THE MAN
. We were a big, happy, healthy family. I was on vacation again. I imagined my dad getting out of his bed of his own accord, unhooking himself from the BiPAP, and looking over to me. He'd shake away all the Lou Gehrig's and return to his old, plump, mobile self.