Eight loafs of juju. Thirty-two cans of chronic. Two-hundred fifty-six eighths of zambi. Eight hundred spliffs of bammy. (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Texas Instruments makes a fine calculator for figuring this out.)
“I’m sorry to ask again, but do you think you could pick up the boys? And feed them dinner? I might be kind of late.”
“Sure.” I notice that she hasn’t offered an excuse and I don’t ask for one. I just turn back to the computer screen and Lisa exits this little room we call “the office,” to go finish getting our future potheads ready for school.
What I was actually doing when she came in was trying to figure out the words on Dave’s marijuana menu, but it is like trying to learn Spanish, this pot-language; there are apparently national and regional dialects (how would you ever know where to smoke wollie, or yeh?), native slangs giving way to brands and hybrids, formal and informal constructions, questions of singular and plural (can you have two sez?), an ever-shifting slang meant precisely to exclude creepy old dudes like me. In fact I’m beginning to suspect that every noun is slang for pot, and every verb also means to get
high. Raise a flag? Pound a nail? Shoot some hoops? Park the car? Feed the cat? Well…that might just be feeding the cat.
Voices trickle up the stairs: “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Dad.” “Bye, Matt.” The house is wrung of its young people and it’s just my dry old man and me, both of us staring into flat, diode screens.
I call down the stairs. “You okay down there, Dad?”
“When does
“Nineteen-seventy-five.”
I finish my dope research and check Lisa’s Facebook page, but she’s gone underground. No more public flirtation. Usually when I do recon, I come across a dozen harmless chats back and forth between Lisa and her old college friends-they send each other good karma and E-hugs and online invitations and it’s no different than grade school, folded notes going back and forth. Usually, in a single night, Lisa receives, and responds to, dozens of these passed notes. Last night there were twenty entreaties to her from various “friends” and she didn’t respond to a single one. It’s all Chuck all the time now, and either she’s learned to keep their conversations private or they’ve moved to a safer platform.
I remember, at a party in college some girls asked me what represented first, second and third base at my high school. These girls were loudly and drunkenly agreeing that first base was kissing and a home run was sex, but second and third were open for debate-everything from booby-outside-the-shirt to heavy petting to making out to blowjobs. I said that at my school, first base was group sex, second base bestiality, third base necrophilia and a home run an elaborate weeklong orgy that ended with a snuff film. The joke, as I recall, fell somewhat flat, ending the usually solid party topic of sex bases. Lisa did always say that my sense of humor was an acquired taste. Like beef heart.
Anyway, I think there must be a sort of electronic version of
those bases now-first base being a simple wall-posting on Facebook or MySpace, second being a private email, third a text message to one’s phone leading to…I don’t know…phone sex or masturbating in front of a computer camera. That’s a pleasant thought for one’s wife and the prince of lumber.
I push away from the computer, spend ten minutes in mortgage-company automated-phone hell
As my father fantasizes rough sex with this pert professional on her crisp news set, I run a comb through his wispy gray hair. He pats his chest for a cigarette.
Dad follows me to the car, where he rides like a vet-bound dog, facing sideways, the world streaming past like the facade of an old arcade game. There is a for-sale sign in the back passenger seat window of my car. Such new details are always alarming to Dad-they must signify something-so every once in a while he looks back at the sign. “You selling this car?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of car is this?”
“Maxima.”
He sighs. “Do you know what I miss?”
“Dan Fouts?”
“Chipped beef.”
“I know you do, Dad.” The sky is clear again today, world
sharply drawn, trees clear of leaves, their anguished branches rising like clutched fingers. It’s quiet in the car. He first had it in the Army; shit-on-a-shingle, they called it. My mom used to make it for him, too. She preferred the description “chipped beef”-which, now that I think about it, is what he says he misses, not shit-on-a-shingle. Huh. So, he misses Mom’s chipped beef. Maybe he misses Mom.
“Dad, what do you say we have that for lunch today?”
“Have what?”
“Chipped beef.”
“I miss that.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
He looks back. “You selling this car?”
“Yeah.”
“What-”
“Maxima.”
He is not happy in the doctor’s office waiting room. For the dementia patient, all of life is a waiting room in which you can’t remember what you’re waiting for and your turn never comes. In this
The nurse calls Dad’s name and he looks at me. I nod and we start to the back of the clinic. She takes his blood pressure and weighs him. He’s lost six pounds in six months. She glances over at me. I know. I know. I’m not feeding him enough chipped beef.
We sit in the doctor’s office. Dad shifts, crinkles the paper-covered table. He stares at a crosscut drawing of the female repro
ductive parts, trying to figure out what he’s looking at: some kind of plant? map of the Gaza Strip? carburetor? Finally, I think his mind gets around what it is, and he winces and looks away.
Dad’s doctor always seems grumpy about our appearance, even though she schedules these routine appointments. I always feel guilty that we’ve taken time away from her important life-saving for a routine maintenance check on Dad’s failing mind. She spends a few minutes on his health; she’s glad he’s quit smoking, even though I fear he’s just forgotten it.
“Okay, Jerry,” she says. “I’m going to ask you a few questions. What year is this?”
My father looks at me, pissed that I’ve done this to him. Last time he guessed 1997.
“Nineteen…” He rubs his dry lips. “No.” And he smiles, because he’s not falling for the trap this time. “One thousand eight.”
“One thousand eight?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And the month?”
“November.”
“So it’s November of one thousand eight?”
“If you say so.” He smiles at me. One thousand eight? Maybe it’s not terrorists we have to fear, the dudes planning another 7/11. Maybe we should be more worried about the Norman invasion. Or the plague.
“Where did you work, Jerry?”
