A Tragic Honesty (90 page)

Among Childress's self-assumed duties was to check the oxygen level of Yates's tanks, since Yates himself almost never remembered to do so; when the time came, Childress would drive to a strip mall in the suburb of Northport and pick up replacement tanks at the medical supply store. No matter how vigilant he tried to be, though, there were days when he'd find Yates blue-lipped and gasping, too disoriented to speak or even listen unless the young man looked him straight in the eye and yelled his words in order to “get them in there.” Again and again he took Yates back to the hospital, and to this day Childress bitterly maintains that “the VA killed him”: “They treated everyone like shit. The waits, even with an appointment, were
hours
long.” One day Yates ran out of oxygen by the time Childress wheeled him into the examination room, and when Yates began to hiss at an orderly for help, the man said, “You need to calm down. You won't get anything until you act right.” Yates continued to gasp and flail in a furious panic, while the man pointedly ignored him; finally Childress spotted an oxygen tank mounted on the wall and helped himself. “Shut the fuck up, Dick,” he said soothingly as he fitted the mask over his face.

Yates had never cooked for himself and wasn't about to start now, and rather than go to the exhausting bother of leaving his apartment for lunch or dinner, he'd often dispense with eating. Childress reminded him that he could get a free lunch at the nearby senior center, but Yates refused. Finally Childress arranged for a friend named John Dobson, who delivered pizzas at night, to become a “fictitious box-lunch driver”—that is, to deliver daily lunches to Yates as if it were part of Dobson's regular job or grad-student duties. The meals came from a lunch counter called Mama Jewel's, which specialized in fatty Southern dishes that were cheap but tasty—a meat and three vegetables for less than four dollars. Yates never questioned or complained about the arrangement.

He wanted more independence, though, and finally asked Childress to get him a car (“the cheapest you can find”). For seven hundred dollars the young man found a rusty reddish Mazda of early-seventies vintage that was in good mechanical shape, though rather too small for its owner's sprawling frame. As a driver Yates soon became a familiar sight in Tuscaloosa: a gaunt whiskered old man hunched over the wheel of his tiny car, a cigarette smoldering in one fist while the other clasped an oxygen mask to his face—“a bomb on wheels” as one student put it. The car had a cranky shift box and no power steering, and when Yates's strength failed he'd pop over curbs and drift into the wrong lane and always, always park awry (lane-parked in a parallel space or vice versa) at the Quik Snak, where he took to eating breakfast most mornings. Childress, who kept the car in running order, considered disabling it before Yates killed himself—though already the locals seemed to be adjusting, automatically making way whenever the telltale Mazda came tooling into their ken. As ever, too, strangers rallied to help Yates: Now that he was drinking beer again (why not?) he'd drive to a particular convenience store where the clerks would carry a case of Heineken out to his car—or else wave him away, whereupon Yates would realize it was
Sunday,
the goddamn blue laws, and he'd have to borrow beer from Childress or one of the others. Whatever his errand, Yates was always exhausted by the time he got back to Alaca Place, sitting forlornly in his car for an hour or so before he could muster the strength to stagger back to his house.

It had been a long time since Yates was part of the lively social atmosphere of a small-town academic community, and now that he was no longer chair writer he tried to make the most of it. Among the seven professors and sixty graduate students in the writing program, there were as many as four gatherings a week—readings, receptions, raucous parties—where Yates was treated as the venerable fixture he was. For Yates it was an alternative to drinking alone on Alaca Place, though he didn't seem to enjoy himself much. At student parties, particularly, the breathless man could hardly hear himself speak over the blaring music (the Ramones and such, whose appeal baffled Yates), nor could he participate in the drunken croquet games on the lawn. Mostly he sat watching with a vaguely pleased-but-puzzled look, and would wince with the effort of hearing the odd solicitous remark. When the Starbucks came to a party, as rarely happened, Yates would be overjoyed at the sight of people his own age. Still, he liked to think he
belonged
among the younger set, and when Parrish failed to invite him to a big Halloween party Yates was hurt. “Look, if you don't want me to come to your house, just say so!” he huffed, as Parrish tried to explain that such a party was apt to get, well, pretty out of control. In the end Yates showed up in his usual tweed and khakis, and when he spotted Tony Earley he began mournfully shaking his head: “Oh—my—
God
…”
Twin Peaks
was big at the time, and Earley had come to the party as the corpse of Laura Palmer, wearing a wig, lingerie, and clear plastic wrapping. “I don't get it,” Yates said whenever someone tried to explain.

He preferred smaller gatherings, and since he didn't own a TV he was often invited to people's houses to watch something of particular interest. Yates was delighted by a documentary about RFK's standoff with George Wallace in 1963, and excitedly pointed and coughed at the screen whenever he recognized one of his old Justice Department colleagues. When he asked J. R. Jones if he'd ever heard of an actor named Joe Pesci—who held the option to
Disturbing the Peace
—Jones invited him over to watch
Raging Bull
; Yates found the movie excellent, and wondered who this guy “Martin Scorsese” was. For the most part, though, Yates's hatred of the movies remained intact to the end. Childress was at least as passionate a buff as Larry in Los Angeles, and like Larry he tried coaxing Yates into watching with him. Finally Yates thought of a movie he'd always wanted to see, Kubrick's
Lolita,
but after the first twenty minutes he told Childress to turn it off. A travesty, he said.

All this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. “Why aren't you
writing
?” he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), “Why aren't you
revising
this? You should be
constantly
revising!” Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: “How could I
improve
it?” he'd fire back, rather than accept a simple compliment, or else he'd point to some flaw that he himself had discovered post facto, to his everlasting chagrin (e.g., the same meal served twice in
Revolutionary Road
). Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realize that if
this
was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else. In fact five years had passed since Childress had written the one story he was somewhat proud of, and Yates was forever harassing him to improve it. And “harassing” was pretty much the mot juste. Yates appeared to be entering a manic phase when Parrish sought his advice about a bleak story titled “Exterminator,” about a man whose common-law wife leaves him to go live in a trailer with another man who beats her. “Now this scene here,” Yates panted, getting louder and louder, “it needs
squalor. More squalor!
” “What you're saying, Dick, is that it needs ‘squalor'?” “SQUALOR!” (“I realized he was exactly right,” said Parrish. “He'd put his finger on it.”)

Yates had mellowed as a parent, at least, particularly toward his beloved Gina. Whatever she did was all right by him, even if it meant relinquishing his dream of sending her to Harvard (after a pleasant summer vacation in Vancouver, she decided to go to the University of British Columbia). She was the last pretty girl in Yates's life, and he acted toward her like a kind of platonic suitor—funny and affectionate and quietly wise. He always enclosed a loving note with his checks (“I would rather spend an hour on the phone with you than be elected by a landslide”), and approved of her future husband Chad in absentia because, he said, she'd become a warmer person for knowing him. The transformative effects of love were such that Yates didn't even object to the tattoo (a flower) Gina showed him on the back of her leg; indeed he seemed to startle himself by finding it “cute,” laughing that if his older daughters had done as much he'd have “hit the ceiling.” When Gina came to Tuscaloosa, Yates rebuffed Childress's offer to show her around. “Nah, you're a dangerous man,” he said, though the outing was to be chaperoned by Childress's jealous girlfriend. The fact was, Yates wanted Gina all to himself, and for two weeks they happily chatted about whatever came to mind (except writing): love, sex, marriage, the way Gina liked to smoke pot when she listened to music. Yates faintly deplored the latter, and pointed out that cows piss in the fields where the stuff is grown. “Later on,” Gina recalled, “during a pause in a totally different conversation, Dad says, ‘You know who else lives in those marijuana fields?' And I said, ‘Who?'
‘Marijuana rats,'
he said sternly. ‘Those little bastards
live
to piss!'”

*   *   *

“I loved and hated Richard Yates,” said Susan Braudy, “as I believe he did me. I miss talking to him very much.” More than his daughters or even Dan Childress, Braudy became the most fixed presence in Yates's life during his last two years in Alabama—though many miles apart, the two spoke on the phone almost every day, including the day Yates died. Originally Braudy had called to discuss her screenplay of
The Easter Parade,
in the hope of drawing Yates out about the “nuts and bolts” of what was “probably [her] favorite novel in the world.” Yates shrunk from the subject. “Sure, sure,” he said finally. “
The Easter Parade
probably
is
about the failure of love.” Soon they found other things to talk about, and Braudy saw a more appealing side to the man. He was forthright but not maudlin about the grim facts of his life, and gruffly opinionated about Braudy's. When she mentioned that she wanted to refurbish an old church in the country, Yates insisted the idea was gauche. But he was also hard on himself, and inclined to be contrite when he sensed that he'd gone too far and hurt Braudy's feelings. This was easily done, as Braudy was nothing if not tenderhearted, to the point of being sorely distressed by the sadness of Yates's life and determined to do something about it. It was Braudy who got in touch with Childress and arranged to pay for the “fictitious box-lunch driver,” and sometimes she'd send money straight to Yates; once, after she'd given him five hundred dollars, he casually admitted that he'd sent it to Gina so she could buy a car.

Yates often made it known that his fondest desire was to return to New York—he had no intention of “nodding out in Dixie”—but as things were, he couldn't even afford to visit. Braudy's affection for her favorite writer was buoyed by a preoccupation with certain Jewish ethical imperatives, namely
Honor elders,
so she decided to bring Yates to New York and honor him one way or another. It wouldn't do, though, simply to buy him a plane ticket and put him up for a few days: It was one thing for such a proud man to accept the odd check out of the blue, another to let a woman explicitly offer him charity. Besides, Braudy wasn't rich, despite whatever Yates had surmised to the contrary because of her generosity and Central Park South address (he was under the impression she was a “dowager” à la Gloria Vanderbilt). She decided, then, to organize a reading and pay Yates an honorarium, raised with donations of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars apiece from a few well-heeled admirers, starting with Woody Allen. “Ms. Braudy found that many writers shared Mr. Allen's take on Mr. Yates and has now organized a group of them to bring the novelist to New York for a tribute,” read an item in the
New York Observer
for April 15, 1991. “Mr. [Paul] Schrader, Richard Price, and Kurt Vonnegut are among the literary stars who've contributed money to fly Mr. Yates in from his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is scheduled to read at the Donnell Library on April 11 at 6
P
.
M
., with a reception to follow at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street.”

Yates planned to arrive the day before his reading—as it happened, his daughter Monica's thirty-fourth birthday. She'd recently moved back to New York prior to starting nursing school at Columbia in the fall,
*
and when she learned of her father's visit she was plunged into a funk. She dreaded seeing him so deathly ill, not to mention drinking again, and figured the reading would be a failure and he'd be sad. She spent the day gloomily riding her bicycle until, as a kind of despondent “madcap stunt,” she rode it down a flight of stairs and gave herself a black eye and a swollen, badly bruised chin.

Meanwhile air travel had taken its usual toll on Yates. “He was a total mess,” said Braudy. “Thinner than any living person should be, and too weak to walk from the plane to a cab.” The appalled woman called for a wheelchair, while Yates muttered dazedly that he'd be all right as soon as he got to the Algonquin, where he'd arranged to have oxygen tanks waiting in his room. Before they arrived, though, Yates seemed to perk up a bit. “You're no dowager,” he said to Braudy in the cab, staring at her intently. “You're a young girl.” Braudy was hardly a “girl” except by Yates's quaint reckoning, though she was very pretty and her relations with Yates had shifted the moment his head cleared enough to get a good look at her. But eros alone wasn't enough to resurrect such a wasted man, and by the time they got to the Algonquin—where the oxygen tanks wouldn't work—he seemed on the verge of total, perhaps permanent collapse. Nonetheless he insisted on meeting Monica and his old student Richard Price as planned, so Braudy assisted him into the dining room; by the time the others arrived, Yates had put his head on the table and begun panting for air. “Not drunk,” he gasped to Monica. “Not drunk, baby.” Then he noticed his daughter's grossly swollen face. “What can I say?” he managed to quip. “I love the big lug.”