Truth in Advertising (14 page)

“Can I help you?”

A nurse appears beside me. She looks like a nurse. I wonder if I look like a copywriter in my blue jeans, boots, and $300 James Perse sweater that Ian and Phoebe made me buy.

“I'm Fin Dolan.”

“His son. Of course. I'm Margaret Nash.”

His son? Legally, I guess.

We shake hands and I think of the proximity her hands have to death and disease. Where does anatomical waste go? (According to an article in
Harper's
some time ago, it goes primarily to one of three places: New Jersey, Staten Island, or Delaware. What is it, exactly, about these places that willingly accept ill-functioning kidneys, spleens, and bloody, viscous tissue?)

“I'm so sorry,” Margaret Nash says. “This must be very difficult for you.”

“It is, yes,” I say with a pained look, as if I'm a character on a soap opera.

“He's stable now. It's a matter of time, of course, until we know something. The doctor should be around shortly.”

“Thank you,” I say to Margaret, who may be forty-eight or may be sixty-two. She has short, shiny silver hair. She's a healthy woman, if her clear eyes and high coloring are any indication.

“You must be very close,” she says.

“Actually, no. I haven't really seen much of him in twenty-five years.”

“Oh . . .”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you,” I say. “He left when I was twelve.” I shrug, fake a smile.

“It's good of you to come.”

We both look at him, not quite sure what to say.

The hospital is quiet, almost no one in the hallways. A machine beeps, then hisses. My mother taught me to dance. She taught me the fox trot, the waltz, the rumba. I got quite good at it, a natural, she said. I could take hold of Margaret right now, sweep her into a nice, long-striding, three-step waltz.
Bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum . . .

“They say it helps to talk to them,” Margaret says, looking at my father, arms crossed tight across her chest. “They hear your voice, somewhere inside.”

What about stabbing them?

She looks at me now, the benevolent nurse's smile. “You could read him a story or a book. Music helps.” Now she shrugs. We're shruggers. We know nothing, really. We're all just guessing.

“Thank you,” I say. “I'll give it a try.”

“Cafeteria's open until nine. It's not much but it's about the only thing you'll find open tonight.”

She smiles and walks away.

There is a window that looks out onto the back of the hospital, a small power plant of some kind, steam coming from one of the buildings, hospital vehicles parked, two men, janitors, smoking in the distance. I'm glad that I don't have to wear a uniform to work.

It seems to me that I must look exactly like a man should look in his dying father's room, standing by the window, pensively. It's the
never-ending commercial again. You wouldn't even need to light this room. There's gorgeous light coming in from the powerful sodium streetlight in the back parking lot, light coming in through the door. I want to share this idea with sturdy Margaret. But what's the product? How about Hallmark cards? A caring son visiting his douchebag father. Daddy's in a coma. The caring son reads the card aloud. The father wakes, brought back from the walk toward the light by his loving son's voice. The son then smothers the helpless father to death with a pillow.

Advertising often attempts the structure and devices of drama and film. And yet for the most part we are, I think, wildly disappointed when, after twenty-three deeply moving seconds of footage showing a grandmother trying to climb the stairs alone with her grocery bags, we see a Hallmark card awaiting her.
Happy Thursday, Nana. Just thinking of you. Love, Petey!

I believe that if the story could somehow continue, in thirty-second installments, it would be more interesting. Not merely another Hallmark commercial, but another product. In the next spot, say, we might see Nana open the door and collapse, the victim of a massive heart attack (pharmaceutical industry). Where's the adorable grandson now?

Imagine it. Several advertisers, we'd never know which one until the end, pooling money, a kind of rolling, continuous TV commercial that never ends. The drama is constant. You don't ever know what it's for because it's constantly changing!

Death. It is one reality we refuse to face head-on in advertising. I think it's time to change that. The question is, can you move product with it? I broached this very topic with Boeing some years ago, late one evening after a day of shooting interior shots of a mock-up of a new 777-400 (their roomiest passenger jet) on a lot at Universal.

“What do you mean the plane
crashes
?” the client asked, his drink suddenly frozen midway to his lips. Hal? Herb? I could never remember.

“I mean it
crashes
, Hal,” I'd said, three-too-many scotches in. “And we
see
it crash. We see all of it.”

“Let me see if I understand you,” he'd said, rather slowly if memory serves. “You are proposing to make a television commercial wherein you
crash
one of our planes. One of our $400 million planes. On television.”

“That is
exactly
what I'm proposing,” I'd said, feeling the rush of the scotch, the heat of the gas fire in the lobby of the elegant Shutters hotel in Santa Monica, that heady feeling of power from talking to the client about an idea that, in this moment, seems to me genuinely brilliant.

“Let's take the gloves off of advertising. Let's see the luggage strewn on the runway. Let's see the random shoe, the eyeglasses that somehow survived the superheated flames. I want to do for advertising what Brando did for theater. Wake people up. Make them feel again. And, to a great extent, horrify them. There's no sound in the commercial. But then, a voice-over. Alan Rickman, maybe. English. Americans love the English. ‘No one can guarantee your safety when you step onto an aircraft. But at Boeing, we're working harder than ever to make sure that you're as safe as you can be.' Something like that. We can tweak it. Herb? Your thoughts?”

Six weeks later we lost the account. I never mentioned the conversation to anyone.

•   •   •

Margaret returns with a doctor and another nurse.

“This is Dr. Benjamin, your father's doctor.”

He shakes my hand and winks at me.

“Mr. Dolan,” he says. “I'm sorry I was unable to speak with you yesterday.”

“I didn't call yesterday,” I say, looking at Margaret and the other nurse for some reason. The other nurse is perhaps twenty-five and strikingly beautiful.

The doctor says, “Your father is in what we call serious but stable condition.” Which makes me wonder if others call it something else. “He's had a myocardial infarction.” He winks at me again. He enunciates these last two words, saying them slowly.

“Is that a real word?”

“Is what a real word?”

“
Infarction
,” I say.

“In common parlance, it means a heart attack,” Dr. Wink says. Double wink. Which is when I realize that it's not a wink, it's a tic. It's a tic that makes it difficult to concentrate on what he is saying about my dying father because it's like a video game, where you're waiting for the next wink. I have an expression on my face that suggests I am listening intently. I watch myself act intense. I think my look is the right one for this situation.

“. . . motor skills and speech,” he continues. Wink. I want to react, to pre-guess when the winks are going to come.

I nod slowly, as if understanding. Heather. The other nurse's name, according to her tag.

“So we wait,” he says. “We watch.” Wink, wink. “So often medicine is a matter of waiting for the body to heal itself.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You might want to try reading to him,” he says, and I look to Margaret, who smiles. “It's been known to help.”

“Thank you,” I say.

He nods, with crisp, military precision, then winks twice and walks away.

Margaret, Heather, and I smile at one another and then they turn to leave.

I stand there looking at him. The change from what I remember is extraordinary and disturbing. He is smaller. His cheeks are hollowed and the skin appears thin, blue veins visible underneath. Were he to shave, blood would burst forth from his face. He is an old man.

But then, he was always old to me. He waited to get married. Perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps he never really wanted any of it. Who waited to get married back then, home from the war, aged by what they had done and seen? They were eager to get on with life, to marry and start a family. Not him. He waited almost ten years. And then they had trouble having children, my mother suffering two miscarriages before finally having Eddie in 1960. Kevin followed two years later. Maura four years after that. And that's how it was supposed to stay. Except I happened.
The little mistake
, he once called me. He was forty-four, an older dad back then.

There were times, after he left, when I would find my mother standing at the kitchen sink, water running, staring at a dish or the wall or the faucet. I wondered what she was thinking about in those long moments. Sometimes she'd be crying. People leave. People die. The secret no one tells us is that we don't get over it, ever.

When Kevin was sixteen and obviously gay, some neighborhood children caught him and another boy kissing in the woods near our home. My father heard the story—everyone in the neighborhood did—and he walked into Kevin's room that evening, the room Kevin shared with Eddie, and began beating him. My mother ran up from the kitchen, wondering what had crashed to the floor. Which is when she saw her husband beating her child, her sweet, kind son who helped her in the kitchen and with laundry and who liked to cook. I'd never heard her scream like that before. Kevin cowered on the floor. I don't know where Eddie came from—I just remember thinking he was moving very fast. And maybe he didn't realize that the person he was grabbing and throwing against the wall was our father. He probably knew when he grabbed fistfuls of my father's shirt, tearing it, pushing him against the wall so hard that my father's head bounced off the wall and for many years after there was an impression in the plaster. I was standing in the hallway, just outside the room. I had been on my way to go hang out with Kevin when my father marched by me and told me to stay out. I stood there and saw the whole thing. I saw as Kevin took his hands away from his face that they were bleeding.
He must have cut his hands
, I thought. And for just a moment I thought he'd put something in his mouth, some Halloween-like thing to make it seem like blood, only it wasn't a Halloween thing, and he spit up real blood on the floor, and he was shaking, and my mother went to him, held him, took the sleeve of her shirt and held it to his nose and she looked up, at me and Maura, and shouted for Maura to take me away. Only Maura couldn't pull me away. She stayed behind me and put her arms around me while Eddie's hand went to my father's throat and clutched it and squeezed it, so that my father winced in pain. Eddie was almost as big as my father then—not as wide, maybe, but strong and fit and angry. He and Kevin are two years apart in age. They rarely got along,
rarely even spoke. And it was common knowledge in the neighborhood and at school, at the skating rink and the parks, that Kevin was a sissy and a fag and a homo and all the other words people used. But God help the person who dared harm Eddie Dolan's brother.

My father's hands went to his own throat. He couldn't breathe. Eddie's face was contorted in rage and he was biting his own tongue so hard that he had blood on his lips. He was throwing punches now, at my father's head and neck and chest, hitting his own hand holding my father's throat. My mother looked up from the floor, from Kevin, holding him still, and screamed, “Stop it!” Only Eddie didn't hear her. I think perhaps Eddie meant to kill our father, to finally stop him, stop the rage and outbursts—Eddie, even when he was smaller, standing up for my mother, taking the slapping and beatings because of it. The fear we all felt every moment our father was home.

Eddie pulled his hand away from my father's neck, which was pink and red. My father slumped a bit, breathing erratically. He looked around and must have seen the horror on my face and Maura's, too, and his bleeding, scrawny, harmless, lovely gay son, and his small wife crying, and his oldest boy, standing at the ready, sideways, right fist clenched so tight his knuckles were white, prepared to go again, wanting to go again, to beat him to death if need be.

My father left the next day for work and did not come home again.

•   •   •

I measure time in memories, fixed points, a street corner where a thing happened, where I will sometimes wonder, years later, why that same thing doesn't still exist every time I pass that street corner. Where did the event go?

Right now I am sitting in the kitchen of our house on Willow Road, eating a fried bologna sandwich because I have a slight fever and stayed home from school. Mostly I think my mother wanted the company. The table is Formica-topped with stainless steel legs, one of which wobbles, so we keep a folded napkin under it. There is a picture window looking out onto the backyard and the Carneys' house beyond. There's a radio tuned to a station that plays swing music, and my mother is smiling. And then it's gone. I run out of film.

We would hear about him from time to time. Occasionally we'd get a visit from one of the cops in his precinct. They'd take a collection and give my mother an envelope. Kevin told me that Eddie went looking for him after he left, waited for him outside the precinct house one night. There was a scuffle, some punches thrown. My mother heard about it. Kevin said she sat Eddie down and begged him to stop what he was doing. She said, “You're becoming like him.”