The Bill from My Father (25 page)

My father showed up for his next appointment with Dr. Montrose at the right hour but a day early, so he wasn't, technically, late or unexpected. She'd been writing a report on the decline of another client when he walked into her office without knocking. He announced that he was carrying &5,000 in cash and wanted to hide it from Betty. According to the doctor, he whipped out his wallet and counted the money again and again, each time arriving at a different figure. She watched for a while, taking notes, then encouraged him to put his money and valuables in a safe deposit box. Finally, she dropped a paper clip onto the floor and asked him to pick it up. Although this was meant to test his motor skills and comprehension, the lag time she reported—“He took quite a while to respond to the instructions”—could just as easily be explained by his incredulity.
Pick it up yourself,
I imagined him thinking.
Do I look like a maid?

The doctor called to tell me that my father's mental health had deteriorated enough to warrant a diagnosis of geriatric dementia. In the weeks since we'd first met with her, I'd been researching assisted living facilities—places either discouragingly expensive or, if affordable, as stark and lonely as holding cells despite promising names like Wilshire Manor and Sunset Village—but now she advised me to keep him at Saint Joseph's for a standard three-day observation
period, during which time the staff would determine whether he should be released on his own recognizance or held at the hospital for a prolonged period of medication and therapy. We agreed that the latter possibility would be the most beneficial since his temper flared uncontrollably. A neighbor at the trailer park had recently seen him threaten one of the service men from the DWP with a potato peeler. “I caught some stranger futzing with my meter!” Dad told Betty in his own defense. Instead of exact change, he'd presented a bus driver with a pair of tarnished salad tongs from the silver service he'd long ago bought for my mother, crestfallen and then abusive when the driver refused to accept them, or, as my father saw it, insisted on a handful of “pitiful nickels” instead of certified sterling. Later, when he couldn't find the tongs, he accused Betty of stealing them.
They didn't just get up and walk away themselves!
Betty was at her wit's end and asked me to intervene. I carefully suggested that he might have left the salad tongs on the bus and reminded him that Betty was there to “watch out for him.” “Why should she watch out for
me
?” he'd shouted. “
I'm
not the thief.” In some strange way his delusions were a windfall, since his best chance for medical care and supervision—to be committed to the psychiatric ward at Saint Joseph's—would be predicated on his worst behavior.

While I had Dr. Montrose on the phone, I asked if his insurance would pay for a private room.

“As far as I can tell, his policy covers …”

A barrage of knocking interrupted our conversation. “You can't just keep me here because you feel like it,” I heard my father yelling. “I'll sue you bastards from here to …”

Dr. Montrose ordered a nurse to escort my father out of the room. A woman burbled assurances, and my father's voice receded along with hers. I asked the doctor if she'd told him I was on the phone, worried that, if she had, he'd think his confinement had been my doing.

“Heavens, no! That would have made things worse. We'll watch him closely and call you once we've had a chance to examine him.”

Moments after I thanked her and hung up, the phone rang again.

“This is Lucinda.”

“Who?”

Lucinda was the nurse who had managed to calm my father down. They were at a pay phone in the hallway outside the doctor's office. He'd insisted on talking to me, and since all he had on him was five grand in one-hundred-dollar bills, she'd lent him change and made the call. Lucinda handed my father the phone.

“Hey there.” He sounded positively jaunty.

“Dad, I know this must be very hard for you …”

“What?” His hearing aid squealed. “I'm at the hospital.” It took me a moment to remember that he didn't know I knew he was there.

“Are you sick?”

“I'm fine. Can you come and get me?”

“Maybe you need to stay there. Is that what Dr. Montrose thinks?”

“What?”

I repeated myself, yelling.

“Don't yell at me, you …!” A pause in which he checked his anger. He couldn't afford to offend me, and he struggled to stay calm. “Can you come and get me?” he asked again, the pitch slightly higher.

“It would take me a couple of hours to get out to Oxnard during rush hour, Dad. Maybe you should wait and see what the doctor says. I could pick you up on Monday.”

“Monday! That's five days away.”

“Three.”

“Three, five, for Christ's sake. I'm asking you to come and get me.”

“Betty can bring you anything you need.”

“I left the trailer when she wasn't looking,” he said. “She treats me like I'm her patient!”

“Listen, Dad. I spoke to Dr. Montrose.”

“Did she think you were my attorney? I'm going to sue!”

“You're there for a reason. It's perfectly legal.”

“Don't lecture me on legal. I was arguing cases before you could wipe your behind!”

“I can come and visit you, but I can't take you home.”

“Talk louder, I can hardly hear you.”

“Put Lucinda on the phone.”

“Who?”

“The nurse.”

“Hello?”

“Can you …I'll talk to you, and then you can tell my father what I've said. That way he might hear better.”

“Okay!” She was yelling already. “I see what I can do!”

“Tell him he has to stay there for at least three days, but I'll come visit him first thing tomorrow morning.”

I stared out the kitchen window as darkness settled on Hollywood, the receiver gripped in my fist. My father could hear Lucinda, but he couldn't understand her Thai accent. He barked at her to slow down and asked what the hell language she was talking; words, like everything else, were slipping beyond his comprehension. Finally, he grabbed the phone out of her hand. “Forget it,” he said. “Don't come and get me. You don't owe me a goddamn thing.”

When I was twenty-eight years old, my father sent me a bill for his paternal services. Typed on his law firm's onionskin stationery, the bill itemized the money he'd spent on me over my lifetime. Since he hadn't kept tabs on the exact amounts he'd doled out over the years, expenditures were rounded off to the nearest dollar and labeled
food, clothing, tuition,
and
incidentals
. Beneath the tally, in the firm but detached language common to his profession, he demanded that I pay him back.

The total was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. I remember being impressed by the amount, though this may have been a defense that allowed me to feel more worthy than worthless; what an expensive life I'd lived! I was shocked and insulted too, of course, not only because my father had made such a calculation, but because my life could be added up—or reduced—to a single figure. To see your existence in the form of a bill gives all your loves and
fears and struggles about as much poignancy as a check for a cup of coffee.

The bill was a Proustian experience in reverse; one glance and the bygone extravagance it allowed me to recapture was purely quantitative, a bunch of numbers that yielded little in the way of memories. I saw my life as a mathematical “problem” whose constituent parts—
clothes: $72,000,
for example—brought to mind not a soft yellow shirt from my boyhood, but a warehouse crammed with shirts and pants and jackets past.

The millions of dollars I supposedly owed my father didn't strike me as a specific sum so much as an abstract, unpayable enormity, especially given the amount then in my checking account. The salary I earned as an adjunct teacher was nothing compared to this Everest of debt. No bar graph or pie chart or table of weights and measures could have better illustrated the fact that I earned a pittance. In short, the bill was having the effect my father had probably intended.

I can't for the life of me remember what had prompted my father to send me this bill in the first place, and as long as I can't remember, I risk sounding as though I'm leaving out some blunder or ingratitude on my part for which this bill was retribution. A discerning reader might understandably wonder if I am
choosing
to make myself appear more innocent and put upon than I actually was. But can't it sometimes take
one
to tango? Don't undeserved blows often come out of the blue?

The truth, as best as I can recount it, has me going about a routine Saturday—I lived at the time in an apartment on Mansfield Avenue, the living room warm with afternoon light—when a letter fell through the mail slot, one among others. It surprised me to see my father's return address; our occasional contact tended to take place on the phone or in person. I noted that the salutation, “Bernard,” wasn't preceded by “Dear,” but this formality seemed fitting for an official document.

There came a point during the literal and metaphorical unfoldings of the letter when I thought, simply,
Oh, an invoice
. Perhaps my
father was sending it along to me for some reason the text would make clear. And so I read on:

Your obligations to your father (the party of the first part) are considerable and the only way to impress upon you (the party of the second part) the necessity of compensating him for the fiscal burdens he bore on your behalf is to make his sacrifices evident in the form of the following, recorded herein as a legal and binding document. Should you fail to make payment in full, this matter will result in actions for which I advise you to hire counsel.

That my father, swept up in lawyerly omniscience, referred to himself in third person only added to my confusion, not to mention the detached sensation that I was gazing upon the letter, and myself slumped in a chair as I read it, from a stratospheric height.

I double-checked the signature. It was his, all right, the letters rich with loops and convolutions.
Go ahead,
I thought,
let him dun me. See if I pay. No parent in his right mind asks his child to reimburse him for that child's life! I didn't ask to be born,
I thought melodramatically. Besides, had I known I'd be charged for my boyhood, I might have eaten fewer snacks, been easier on my shoes, more frugal with my allowance.

Suppose I actually
would
need to hire a lawyer to fight this in court? The first candidate who sprang to mind was none other than my father. In other words, as I sat in my sunny living room, utterly stunned, my image of him would not shift from Dad-as-lawyer to litigant-as-Dad.

I couldn't help but dream up a doozy of a counterclaim, its itemizations even more preposterous than my father's:
chronic insecurity—$90,000; narcissistic wound—$75,000; oedipal complex—$15,000
. Of course, because these damages were psychological in nature, it was both difficult and whimsical to assign them a monetary value, but the punitive spirit of this counterclaim was gratifying. For a while at least. Then the whole petty endeavor depressed me and I thought,
Is this what people are to each other, a flurry of demands that can't be met, hurts for which there's no restitution?

By ignoring my father's letter, I risked his vengeance, and though I seriously doubted that he'd have the audacity to take me to court, the letter proved him capable of who knew what. To answer back, to acknowledge his claim in any way, was to give it credence. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if his demand
did
have credence, especially if I thought of the debt as familial rather than monetary; he was my father, after all, the man who bore my “fiscal burdens,” and every son owes his father something. Are we not, from conception till death, the spermatozoa launched by our fathers and flailing our way through the world? I slipped the bill into my desk drawer, resolving to calm down and allow some time to pass before I figured out how, or whether, to respond.

During the days and nights that followed, I couldn't settle on a convincing or comprehensible reason to explain why my father had sent me the bill, though I suspected the catalyst might have had something to do with his offer, a few months earlier, to buy me a new car. He'd made the offer on a day I'd come to visit him. As I pulled into the driveway, he was watering the birds-of-paradise in his front yard. Back then I drove a Fiat whose paint had oxidized to the overall color and texture of rust. The car sputtered as I shifted into park, coughing a cloud of noxious exhaust. Just a year after I'd purchased the car with money from a small inheritance left by my mother, it began to fall apart with vengeful rapidity. The vinyl upholstery flaked off the seats in sticky black patches. Soon they were nothing but lumps of raw foam that crumbled like stale sponge cake. One of the rear windows no longer rolled up. My apartment didn't come with a garage, which meant that I parked on Mansfield Avenue; despite the wide open window, the car's condition made it unattractive even to thieves. If it rained outside the Fiat, it rained inside as well. On cold nights a stray dog made the backseat his home, leaving behind a legion of fleas to feast on my ankles. It was humiliating to be seen inside the car, especially in Los Angeles. When idling at a stoplight beside a purring sports car with rear stabilizers,
anodized hubcaps, and a leather interior, I had to force myself to remember that an automobile does not a man make, and that I was a writer who placed a higher value on words than on material possessions. Which is to say that I cultivated a hollow sense of superiority around new cars. I couldn't afford to fix the Fiat and, having failed auto mechanics in junior high, couldn't repair the car myself. With all this in mind, I parked on the shady side of my father's driveway in the hope he might not notice what a rattletrap my car had become.