Amp'd (22 page)

“That
would
be fun. And the amputee-company picnic could have a true three-legged race! But no. We worked together over at fish conservation.”

“Goddamn fish counters,” he mutters, as if the Illinois Center for Ichthyological Conservation were some kind of notorious outlaw motorcycle gang renowned for their mayhem.

With no satisfactory reply forthcoming, the sheriff turns his attention to Dad. When I try to explain his condition I'm cut short by a perfectly executed lawman's glare. (Even Cancer Boy stops swinging his feet.) Dad sits staring and unresponsive to questioning, but at least he doesn't bare his teeth. I recommend moving Dad into the closet, from which I promise he'll answer all the sheriff's questions via cell phone. The sheriff fixes me with another long, murderous stare before relenting.

Suddenly verbal on my speakerphone, Dad, in clear but rambling discourse, gives his view of what had happened in the woods … and leading up to the woods … and events as he recalls them in the weeks and months preceding the woods—more than the sheriff or I had wished, including our shared use of Dad's marijuana and my truncated sexual fling with his nurse—tying it all back to his time as an Olympic biathlete, and Tommy Baker serial-fucking his way through the Innsbruck Games. Several times, the sheriff attempts to interrupt and steer Dad's testimony back on some reasonable track, but there is no easy silencing of Dad behind the closed door as he grows more agitated and soon shouts
Shut the fuck up and let me finish!,
a perfect entry line for Cancer Boy's mother as he himself doubles over in hysterics.

While she listens to the sheriff's explanation of events as he shakily understands them, I remove Dad from the closet.

“I admit, I didn't think this through,” I interrupt. “I just wanted both of them to have a good time. Fun is a rare commodity when you're sick.”

“Not as lacking as common sense, apparently. A stroke victim with a rifle?”

“The kid was as safe as I could make him under those admittedly treacherous circumstances.”

“Am I to understand he did not have permission to take the boy?” The sheriff is barely able to repress a smile. “That's a more serious charge—”

“I don't want to charge anybody with anything! I just want to take my son home!”

“Of course, he's free to go.”

Cancer Boy's mood contrasts sharply with what would be expected of someone just released from police custody. He shuffles sadly past Dad, who again shows all his teeth, forcing a reluctant smile in return.

“Hey,” I demand his attention. “How cool was today?”

“
So
fucking cool!” He smiles wider, and high-fives me just before his mother yanks him from the room.

With the boy gone, the sheriff's language and face take colorful turns as he challenges me to provide one single goddamn piece of evidence supporting the absurd claims of my brain-scrambled father's speakerphone testimony. When I again produce my cell phone, I swear he seems poised to shoot me and am convinced the only reason he does not is because then he'd also have to shoot Dad to eliminate any witnesses. Ultimately I am able to tap my way to Dad's Wikipedia entry as a member of the 1964 U.S. Olympic Biathlon team, which also notes the official record of Tommy Baker without mention of his noteworthy indoor triumphs. When a deputy enters with a folder, the sheriff thrusts my phone back at me and settles in his chair, riffling the pages.

“So that's an Olympic event, skiing and shooting?”

“Before you say anything that would understandably disparage the sport, so is curling.”

“What do you know about your friend Will?”

“Great guy. Bad at patty-cake. Why?”

“He's on probation.”

If I had two hands, I'd hold my head in them. “And that makes this”—I gesture aimlessly—“worse.”

“That it does,” he agrees, still looking down. “Also, your nurse, Consuelo—”

“Consuel-
a,
” I let escape without thinking. His eyes dart up at me like a weapon locking on target.

“She's illegal.”

That's just perfect.

“Also flunked her drug test. And so did you.”

“I have a prescription for that.”

“I'm sure you have pre-scrip-
shuns,
” he accentuates the plural, “for all the shit we found. Doesn't make it legal to operate a motor vehicle or discharge a firearm.”

“I didn't fire anything,” I offer weakly.

“Here's how it's gonna go,” he explains, elaborating on the unnecessary attention garnered by the Boy Scouts litigation, and the further embarrassment of facing an upcoming sheriff's election with yet another incident. Even Dad can see I'm about to be extorted into dropping my lawsuit and in no time at all, promises are made and weak handshakes exchanged, and only one of us grins.

“What about them?” I ask, powerless.

“Can't help. She's federal; ICE wants her. Your friend Will?” He shrugs. “Depends. Maybe just a slap on the wrist.”

“Yeah, well, it hurts more when you only have one wrist,” I grouse. “If there's bail, I'll pay it. But he doesn't have to know.”

“That's between you and your club,” he pokes needlessly.

“The guy's a war hero. He doesn't deserve to be punished just because I talked him into doing something stupid.”

The sheriff appears bemused for the first time, perhaps ever. He waves the folder with the expertise of a game-show host. “There's nothing here about any military service.”

“That's impossible.”

“Not really. Lots of assholes pretend to be heroes. There's even a law makes it illegal, ‘Stolen Valor' or some such.”

The ringing in my ears grows louder. “Can I ask what he's on probation for?”

“Sure. Blowing off his arm with a homemade bomb.”

*   *   *

Having purchased our freedom by way of extortion, Dad and I are released to the custody of the Wheels on Wheels (“WOW”) wheelchair taxi service. With my undiscovered van back on the outskirts of Crawlywood it's our only option, a lonely one, with Will, Consuela, and Cancer Boy gone—the Will I thought I knew gone for good. Dad yelps a couple of times but placing his head in a bag seems like the kind of thing that might initiate an elder-abuse investigation, so instead I put my baseball cap on Dad and pull the brim down low over his eyes. It seems to help.

Our driver is surprised to find his destination is an abandoned van on a quiet dirt road, but in helping to move Dad, he's more surprised to see the large alligator inside. Thanks to the motionless torpor induced in Ali by the semi-refrigeration of hours inside a metal van, I'm able to convince the driver that this is a dead, taxidermied specimen—which, had the sheriff found him, might have been his actual fate. Driving home, I'm glad I don't have to call Dad in his closet to tell him of Ali's tragic and violent end, another lost link to his better past.

 

CONNECTED

We all know cell phones can be annoying, but can they also make you happy? Yes, according to scientists in Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt, where they tested happiness in subjects newly in love only to discover, quite by accident, something unexpected: the mere ringing of a call from their better halves triggered a pleasurable, anticipatory response in both males and females.

Is that a cell phone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me on your caller ID?

One notable gender difference was that when an attractive member of the opposite sex was introduced immediately after such a call, males remained on … ahem, high alert, while women returned to a normal brain-wave state. Go figure!

Sadly, as relationships progressed—“for better or worse,” as the saying goes—this effect wanes over time, even in happy liaisons, in much the same way a cell phone battery eventually dies. At least Pavlov's dog always wanted that drink of water.

This is Sunny Lee, with
The Sunny Side.

*   *   *

Perhaps emboldened by his exchange with the sheriff who could not silence him, Dad becomes as obsessed as a teenager with a new iPhone, dialing everyone for lengthy, sometimes lucid chats. The first time he called Jackie they spoke for nearly fifteen minutes, although her side of the conversation consisted mostly of wailing sobs and eventually even Dad got bored and hung up. He also phones Fred Weber, Tommy Baker, Mom, and Mom's fireman at the firehouse. He calls Michelle at the Four Corners to make unnecessary reservations, and Dim Sum & Then Some to gloat, “I have your pens.” He calls his former place of employment where he hasn't worked in years, old schoolmates and girlfriends he had not spoken to in decades, and wrong numbers with whom he chats anyway. All from the dark sanctuary of the hall closet, where I'd cleared a path so he could enter and turn around, and I'd even added a little end table with a bud vase for ambience he could not see in the blackness.

Dad and I also continue to chat, inches from one another, separated by a hollow-core door and a billion misfiring synapses. Although his mental stamina has increased enough for lengthier conversations, he still eventually trails off into fugue:
dark phone hungry doctors baseball Fleischmann's …
the line gone dead or, more accurately, slowly dying. Then he plugs in his earbuds and listens to music in shuffle mode—a nonlinear playlist matching the workings of his own brain—until our new burly, fifty-five-year-old Hungarian male nurse, Béla, comes to bring him back to the light, where Dad shrivels along with his pupils. (Even here he seems better: watching the Olympic trials together, when a U.S. biathlete missed his target I could tell by Dad's muted
grunt
that he knew it.)

My own transition back to solitary pot smoking has felt a little lonely so I turn for solace to Internet porn, where the sheer number and diversity of aberrant behavior only depresses me further. That I have no desire to relieve myself on someone's chest or have objects inserted inside me or dress up like one of the Banana Splits while chained spread-eagle to a sawhorse makes me feel repressed in a normalcy that seems, judging by the Internet, to belong to a tiny minority, rendering me that much more the outsider.

It's while clicking through and past these flash-frames of limitlessly imaginative sexual ignominy that I stumble across the latest meme—an offshoot of voyeuristic amputee sex, arguably the basement of debasement—hilarious amputee homages to the original “The First Cut Is the Deepest” video featuring a variety of other artists, including Sheryl Crow, Drake, a surprising number of reggae singers, a rap version by I-Roy, and of course Cat Stevens's original. Dozens of them, with tens of thousands of views apiece, of singing and dancing arm and leg stumps, with hand-drawn Señor Wences faces, lipstick smears, Sharpie scribbles, and yes, the occasional tattoo (mine included). Any sexual urge I might have had vanishes faster than if Béla had suddenly appeared in all his beefy, hairy nakedness to hose me with ice water.

(If it's possible to feel worse, I even stumble across a podcast where a disgruntled Steve unconvincingly makes his case as the originator of the meme, going so far as to show it in its original form on his phone, which of course is me telling the tale of Bob the Sea Serpent. I forward several links to Jackie and pass out knowing that by morning my current displeasure will be multiplied, like a true virus.)

*   *   *

What I did not count on was my e-mail spurring Jackie back on a plane here, unannounced, grim-faced, sadder than I've ever seen her.

“You shouldn't be here,” I argue against the logic of my eyes. “You were very clear that you had a life in California—a job, a husband, a mortgage to pay.”

“At the moment, all I have is the mortgage,” she says, dragging her wheelie past me. “I left Steve. Or more accurately, I told him to leave. That was a
horrible
thing he did with your video!”

“Technically, all he did was post it and then try to take credit for the work of more ambitious morons with advanced editing skills and too much time on their hands.”

“That was just the last straw. There's so much more I won't get into. Did you know he's addicted to Internet porn?”

And too dumb to clear history, I'm guessing. “So this isn't my fault.”

“Not really. You're the catalyst, though.”

I hug her. “You can't be mad at a catalyst. That would be antiscience. What about your job? You haven't been out of work since you were a type-A teen.”

“I needed time to deal with all of this, and of course Dad. They said they'd fire me if I took any more time off, so I quit.”

“You showed them!”

“Don't worry, I'll find something challenging and less soul sucking.”

“Not here, I hope. You're not cut out for the glamorous field of fish counting.”

“I'm exhausted.” She flops on the couch. “Where's Dad?”

If Jackie is surprised to find Dad inside when I swing the closet door open, she doesn't show it. But Dad's face, after a glimpse of recognition and joy to see his only daughter, grows slack again. I nudge Jackie inside and gently shut the door behind her.

“Hi, baby,” Dad says in the dark, and I can tell by rustling clothes and muffled sobs that Jackie has leaned in to smother him in a hug.

After three days spent mostly in the closet yakking away like sports talk radio, Dad stops speaking completely. Understandably concerned, Jackie calls me to join them in the closet where she sits, holding Dad's hand. I try to jump-start Dad with a stream of conversational prods but get no reply in the darkness. We take him out to daylight and then back into the darkness, rocking him back and forth like a car caught in a snowdrift, but he remains stuck. I put a bag over his head for a minute and then pull it off, but he neither dozes under it nor does he leap back to life with its removal.