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expired catalogs
Tuesday, April 7 2009
setting: 5 miles south of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia
Though he was supposedly better after a certain point last night, my father's anxiety attacks resumed this morning and he was thinking of having Hoagie call an ambulance (since there was no way he'd ever enter a hospital through its waiting room again). For this reason he was well on his way to using more medical resources in the past month than he had in the 85 years that had preceded it.
I sat with him for awhile, asking questions and making suggestions. I wondered if perhaps the Celexa he's been prescribed might be causing trouble in its ramp-up phase and told him about how Gretchen cuts hers in half. (I'd thought that in so doing she was ending up with a 10mg/day dose, though I learned later that she was cutting 40mg pills in half to arrive at the same dose my father had been prescribed: 20mg/day.)
As I sat there talking to my dad, I kept looking at the windrow of old catalogs and magazines in front of me, all of it blanketed by thick brownish-grey layer of household dust. Rising up here and there from the dusting were ancient cobwebs which was also thickly encrusted with dust. Josh Furr had also tipped me off to spots of black mold that had spread across the new drywall of Don's room (which was restored to habitability by professional carpenters some years ago). How could this not be impacting my father's health? He's a frail old man who sits around all day. If anyone should be vulnerable to dust and mold, it should be him. So I quietly started picking through a cardboard box of dust-covered paper items, separating it into two piles: old expired catalogs and everything else. The expired catalogs (Sharper Image, various horse equipment providers, and, thanks to a welding suggestion I'd made a year ago, Harbor Freight) constituted over 90% of the contents of the box. There was also a clearly blown-out lightbulb, and a number of branded kitchen spatulas promotings some event. "Great!" I thought, thinking of the extra livable room that would result from the removal of this useless mass. But eventually Hoagie came in and caught me and said, get this, "Actually, everything in that box I was meaning to save." "No you weren't!" I insisted, "There's catalogs from 2006 in there!" At this my father began complaining that he couldn't take an argument, so I shut up, but I was fuming inside. Eventually I revisited the topic this way: "Remember a long time ago when I used to live here? How I'd clean up the house every now and then? It would stay clean for a week or so and gradually become dirty again. I don't see why I can't do that now." At this my father got angry, as much as he could given his health, so I had to back down again. But eventually the ultimate altercation came. I found myself shouting at them both, "Can't you smell the dust and the mold in here? Why won't you do anything about it? You're going to die here!" At this my Dad began moaning and my mother said, "You better leave." So I did. Fuck her. She can't talk about anything in that house except Chaps the dog and welding. Everything of consequence is taboo. I fucking hated my family. Go ahead and die; get it over with. You're not doing a damn thing worth living for! And why did you have to involve me in your mess?
I returned to the doublewide, too a long leisurely shower, and then drove into town with my laptop. I ended up at Blue Mountain Coffee (the little coffee shop on the Wharf) where I had a bagel and a coffee and took advantage of their WiFi. It was good to send off some emails, both personal and work-related.
Once I'd returned home, I packed up all my shit and mustered the gumption to go across the street and say goodbye. Strangely, it was as if nothing had happened earlier. I even made a couple fruitless calls to my father's doctor in hopes of getting some advice about his anxiety and Celexa prescription. And my mother was perfectly pleasant, even offering to give me the rest of a fifth of Jack Daniels I'd started in on last night.
The rest of my stay in Virginia would be in Charlottesville. I drove across the Blue Ridge and ended up on the Downtown Mall, which used to be the launching pad for many a crazy weekend. But it was the middle of the week and 14 years later, and both Charlottesville and I had changed. Me: well, I've chronicled the ways. Charlottesville, meanwhile, had become a wealthier, less funky place. It had gone through the George W. Bush bubble years with everyone else and now was looking a little sad in the aftermath of its collapse. For the first time ever, I could see multiple storefronts on the Mall that were available for lease. Near the mall's center was a new highrise building that was still mostly incomplete. Its interior was open to the weather and was still just rough-poured concrete and steel I-beams, though a sign proclaimed it would be opening this summer. Here it was a weekday, and it was a dead worksite; it didn't look like any work had been done on it in weeks.
The main industry of the Downtown Mall these days is a seven million dollar project to replace all of its paving bricks with new ones. Evidently ladies had been breaking off their heels in the cracks between them (Jessika would later tell me that one of her heels had fallen victim to one such crack).
After some coffee and WiFi at the Mudhouse and two slices of mushroom pizza at Christian's, I went over to Jessika's place. But no one was there. The street out in front of her house was full of a multiracial contingent of children on bicycles executing the same monotonous loop over and over and over again. Across the street, several houses were boarded up and abandoned. This wasn't the Hogwaller neighborhood I'd remembered, the one that used to be next in line for some good 90s-style Charlottesville gentrification. This was some sort of weird Mad Maxian post-apocalyptic Hogwaller.
I'd made the mistake of traveling without a cellphone, something I will probably never do again. There are no public phones anymore, and email doesn't really work as an effective real-time communication technology. I needed to call Gretchen. I needed to call Jessika. It would have been nice to call my old buddy Nathan. But I couldn't call anyone. And the email address Nathan had had since 1995 is no longer functional.
Eventually darkness fell and I returned to Jessika's house and did find people there. There was a little girl in the front room watching teevee. It turned out to be Peggy's five year old daughter Aurora. Peggy (who was down visiting from greater Philadelphia) was in the kitchen with Jessika making pasta. When I showed up, Jessika asked if I wanted a "hot toddy," which is kind of an Irish tea involving (in this case) the whiskey known as Old Crow. I went out to my car and fetched the Jack Daniels, though (after that wedding) neither of us were in any mood to drink very much. As for Peggy, well, she claimed she'd given up drinking for Lent. I asked if she was Catholic these days and she demurred.
Fresh in my mind was the ordeal at my parents' place, and a discussion of what to do about that interleaved with Jessika telling me about her job working the night shift among crazy people ("customers") at a "wellness recovery center."
At some point Aaron came home from some new movie production gig he's involved with. He cracked open a Schlitz, which seems to be his beverage of choice. Everyone went to bed fairly early. As for me, I slept on the couch.
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