The Last Cadillac (25 page)

Four days a week, when I heard the front door click around nine o'clock, I sank back into my pillow, dropped the newspaper, drained my tea, and closed my eyes. It was Marilyn to the rescue.

I held my breath through the good days, but I had my eye on Tick. He seemed to be doing all right in school, bringing home a few A's in language but F's in algebra.

“What's the point, Ma? If I ever see a hypotenuse in my whole life, I'll walk right by it.” I silently agreed, but then I suggested a tutor. “I'll ask Erin,” he said, dropping the matter and getting out the door with inimitable speed.

“Erin?” I said, but my only answer was the sharp click of the door.

Then I met Erin.

It was a short time after Tick and Dad's conversation on the patio—about the fight at school—when I came home from the grocery store to find Tick in the backyard with three boys and one girl—a lovely girl, tall and too thin, reminding me of a calla lily, if people are flowers. She was smiling at
Tick, and Tick was laughing, his hat pushed up as he leaned back in the patio chair.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, Mom,” Tick said. The chair clunked upright as he got up and pointed to the boys: “Pecker, I mean, sorry, Jake Becker, Jared Romeo, and Tony Mark.” I already knew Tony Mark, a quiet, sweet kid whom one of Little Sunshine's friends named “Eggplant” for his ability to just sit there and not move—like the eggplant she'd spied on the kitchen counter.

“Hi,” they said, a chorus of cracking voices, high and low.

“And this is Erin,” said Tick. The girl named Erin came around the table and offered a slim hand.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was high and as thin as she was. I suspected she would fly off if I let go of her hand. She had clear, green eyes and wore a tight blue top and jeans that skimmed her hips. She seemed a little out of place, but relaxed, and maybe even older than these goofy boys who hovered around fifteen.

I went off to rescue the groceries before they cooked themselves in the hot car parked in the driveway. Back in the kitchen, I peeked at the bunch of them sitting on the patio. They were all laughing, but soon they peeled off and I heard, “Later, Dude.”

Tick bounded into the kitchen, sweaty but happy. It was a good time to talk. Erin had offered her hand to me, and I would use her, unmercifully.

“What a nice bunch,” I said. “And that girl is darling.”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning against the counter and reaching into a bag of potato chips.

“What's she doing hanging out with you guys?” Then I quickly added, “Not that you're not darling, too.”

“Yeah, Mom, we're darling,” he said, grinning. “Erin's cool.”

“They're all cool. I'm glad to see you're having a good time,” I said, and then I ventured forth. “It's been tough, hasn't it?”

“Yeah, kinda. But Erin's helped me a lot. She's older, but she kind of introduced me around, and she stuck with me in the cafeteria. We just hang out.”

“I'm so glad.” I stopped moving from appliance to counter to cupboard and looked at Tick. He was intent on getting the last crumbs out of the bag, but then he looked up at me, and smiled, and I saw the sweet boy in there.

“And she's smart. She even knows some algebra—hypotenuses and stuff,” he said. “She's wonderful.”

No one could ask for better than that.

Along with The Leg and the stenosis, the residue of the stroke that made his left side weak and his brain confused, Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer several years earlier. But the condition didn't seem to concern the doctors as much as the possibility that he might have another stroke.

“A stroke will probably get him before the cancer does,” the urologist told me during one our trips to the doctors. “The prostate cancer is not a big worry, especially because it grows more slowly in the elderly.”

I relayed part of that message to Dad—about the prostate cancer being slow growing, avoiding mention of the stroke business—but Dad seemed unconvinced.

“That makes me leery, when you say not to worry,” he said.

He was plenty worried about things that were happening to him, things he couldn't understand or control.

We sat in the doctor's office one afternoon waiting to get the results of Dad's latest Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test, which the doctors used to monitor factors in the blood for clues on the activity of the cancer. His PSA had been low, but it had to be checked routinely.

The waiting room was packed with old men with whom I avoided eye contact. I sat with my nose in an ancient
People
magazine so I wouldn't have to look at them and imagine their tortured genital areas. I usually didn't have to feign interest in my reading material for long because this doctor was prompt about inviting us into his white and steel parlor—an unusual circumstance. Since bringing Dad to Florida, we had been coming to see Dr. Ranken infrequently for checkups for more than a year. I liked him. He got to the point, was thorough, and he explained the situation in plain English.

The doctor came into the room and hoisted himself up on a tall metal stool. I knew he was a busy urologist, because there were always a lot of problems out there in his waiting room. I had no idea how much trouble men could have with their equipment until my father started to fall apart, and I started reading about prostates in the news and on the Internet.

“You doubled it, that old PSA,” the doctor said. “We have to talk about that.”

His PSA count had shot up from nineteen to forty-six in three months. Any count over twenty indicated abnormal activity, and in Dad's case, the cancer was probably on the move. The news was not good.

Dad started crying. “They cut off my Dad's balls, and it didn't do any good. I'm not going to let that happen. They won't take my balls. I'll go to my grave with my balls on.”

I was at a loss for words. I turned to the doctor. Let him say something comforting, or change the diagnosis—and the subject—altogether. He was busy with the chart, so I reached over to pat Dad's arm, which I noticed was dotted with dark red spots from the Prednisone for The Leg. We had arrived at
a balancing act of managing one problem against the other, trying to put one condition down at a time while dealing with another.

“Dad, they won't do that,” I said. “That's not going to happen.” I didn't care if it were true or not; Dad was distraught.

“Right, right,” the doctor said. “We don't want surgery. You're not a good candidate for it anyway. And it's not the right thing to do at your age, in your condition. But we should talk about hormone manipulation in another way. We could give you a shot that cuts down on the production of testosterone.”

“What's the theory of the hormone thing?” Dad said. I was glad he'd stopped crying into a fistful of Kleenex.

“We can take the air out of the fire,” said the doctor.

“Sort of dance around it?” Dad said.

“Yes, exactly; that's good. The cancer does abate with the therapy, but it may come back. It's worth a try.”

Dad was remarkably lucid at the news. He was so relieved to know that he could get a shot and not have to lose his parts.

“Dad, why don't you go ahead and try the hormone therapy?”

“I might as well. If it's going to hamper my sex life, that's no problem.”

I'd heard enough about prostates and balls and testosterone, the most dangerous hormone in the world, and I wanted to get on with it and get out of there. The doctor made sense, and he had settled our health concern of the day.

The doctor gave Dad a shot of Leupron (at a cost of $1,800), which cut the production of testosterone. It was a type of chemical castration, but we did not refer to it as such,
since the term seemed to carry the connotation of sexual deviation for perverts. I tried not to think of it in those terms either, or not to think of it at all, but the shot worked. He didn't have to have the surgery that was once routinely prescribed for prostate cancer, because Dad's PSA shot down to five and stayed there. He had none of the possible side effects, which included hot flashes and dizziness. He got a reprieve, of sorts. But the reprieve didn't last long.

The next thing I knew, Dad got an infection that brought about some unexpected benefits.

As if the prostate cancer, The Leg, and the stroke situation weren't enough, Dad also had been laid low with a scary bout of throat cancer at the age of seventy. It amazed me that he kept on going, despite the list of debilitating diseases and conditions he came up with, and once they started, they didn't seem to stop. When the doctor found the throat cancer, he recommended that Dad's larynx be excised, which would have left him belching out his words through an electronic implant. My mother went into a frantic spin trying to find alternate treatment, and she found it. One doctor was willing to give Dad a series of chemo and radiation treatments that proved so successful they left his throat smooth and clear of cancer to the degree the doctor couldn't even detect Dad had had cancer.

Five years after this full recovery, at the age of seventy-six, Dad took up smoking cigars and the occasional cigarette. He said he didn't inhale, but I knew what that meant. To think that any of us went along with this, let alone gave him tobacco, gives me shivers to this day. His doctors knew he was smoking. “What's the use,” they said, “at that age, a cigar or a few cigarettes a day can't hurt.”

The trouble happened when it got to be more than a few a
day, as is usually the case. He sweet-talked family and friends into giving him cigarettes, and he bummed them at parties and from visitors. He even got a cigarette off a passerby in the parking lot when I left him in the car to run into Walgreens. He was worse than a kid who couldn't stay out of the cookie jar. And the worst was that I went along with it. We all did. I was a wimp for not putting my foot down. I assuaged my guilt daily when I gave him a lecture along with his ration of up to three cigarettes.

But it caught up with him. Finally, I reached the point of declaring that there would be no more rationing of cigarettes, and no more smoking. Period. Dad came down with a full-blown respiratory infection, which he apparently got from Little Sunshine, and then he made himself worse with the smoking. He needed to go to the emergency room, and just before we were ready to leave, I found him plopped in a chair wearing his hat and coat, his cane ready, and he was lighting a cigarette. The wheezing and the puffing all at once were alarming. This infection definitely was bringing about the end of his smoking career, and I was glad of it.

I picked up the squishy pack of Marlboro Lights and waved them at him. “That is your last one,” I said.

He ignored me, because obviously he was enjoying his last cigarette, despite the fact he coughed between puffs. I was pretty sure he didn't believe me anyway, that I would take away his cigarettes. He really had learned to live in the moment, and he enjoyed those moments. But I was exasperated with the dumb smoking. I'd quit, but I'd let him have his ration. Now, it seemed, it would be the death of him. I got lax with Marilyn around. And Tick, Tick was smoking, and it didn't matter what lengths I took to dissuade him from it. He smoked, and he was in cahoots
with his grandfather when I wasn't looking. It was an awful, vicious curse.

Dad puffed his way to the end, and then he tried to get me to relent. I was adamant “No, that was it—your last cigarette.”

“What do you mean? I practically gave you your first cigarette. And now you're going to take them away from your own father?”

“For God sakes, Dad. Whatever are you talking about? You NEVER gave me a cigarette.”

“That's what you say.”

He never gave me cigarettes. Beginning at age twelve, I stole them from the drawer in his nightstand. My siblings and I went through a fancy charade for years to disguise the fact that we were all smoking Mom and Dad's cigarettes, as well as buying Kents at the drugstore after school for twenty-five cents a pack. We chewed gum, aired out the house, and drove the car with all the windows open, even on the worst winter days. When I developed a terrible hacking cough at sixteen, and my mother took me to get a chest x-ray, she couldn't wait to announce the results: “Your lungs are black as tar.”

But short of tying us up in our rooms, we kept smoking, all of us. It was years and years before I quit.

“You should understand how I need them,” Dad said. “It's in my life blood. I'll probably die of nicotine withdrawal.”

“No, it's the other way around. You're going to die with it. The smoking is killing you faster than anything else you have,” I said. “Just listen to yourself. Look in the mirror.”

His breathing was wispy and labored and his face was pasty. But he was resolute, all the way to the emergency room. Under that slouchy hat, his lips were pursed tightly.
It gave me all the more resolve. He wanted to take a pack of cigarettes with him to the hospital, and he grabbed my purse where I'd stashed the last of the Marlboros.

“They don't treat a condemned man so badly. Have a little class (
wheeze
). Let a man down easy. Just one more; come on (
wheeze
).”

I threw my purse in the back seat and hoped he didn't lunge for it as I pulled into the drive of the hospital. He didn't. He sat still and pouted. The front of his jacket was dotted with holes from cigarette sparks. I was glad he wouldn't ever be so close to lighting himself on fire again.

He made one last wheedling plea as he got out of the car and into a wheelchair at the emergency room door. He quieted down while we waited for the doctor, and waited, and then finally, when the doctor was standing in front of him with a clipboard, about to listen to his chest and admit him with an acute respiratory infection, Dad said, “Mind if I take a break, doctor? I'd like to just step outside with my daughter.” He had a wistful look in his eyes.