Michael Tolkin, �The Player�
I�m going to try and do an actual entry, though it�s 12:20 in the morning, my eyes hurt from wearing contacts for three weeks straight, I�m tired and there�s this general sense of wanting things to be over.
My father, after being locked in the hole, as I started calling the place that had taken him in, started to get more depressed. Stuck in an environment where he was pretty much confined to his room, unless he wanted to walk back and forth for the 30 feet of hallway (as the reminder on the community board told them to do daily), he started to wither away in his room. I stopped in one night at about 7pm with some things he had asked for and I found him sitting on the edge of the bed, asleep with his head slumped forward and his arms hanging over the side. The picture said more about his experience there than anything I can think of to write, particularly since it�s 12:25 in the morning: He, having nothing but a small room with a bed and a chair, sat on the edge until boredom overtook his consciousness.
Over the years since he had his accident, he�s gone from an extremely active and social lifestyle to one of a cantankerous hermit. Recently, when I was going through his personal effects (which I�ll get to in a while), I saw some of the cards and letters he received and saved over the years. There was a definite difference in the passage of time, starting with people talking about how they missed him and hoped to see him again sometime soon in the future, to smaller notes, simply saying they hoped things got better for him.
This is easier for me to analyze than describe, since I had so much time over the last three years to see how he spoke with people (and the fact that it�s 12:30 in the morning). The person who used to never have a bad thing to say about life, or anything at all for that matter, had grown accustomed to bemoaning his station in life at present. It�s a different personality from what people were used to, and others around him seemed to be distancing themselves from him.
But that didn�t count for everybody, however. As I�ve mentioned previously, my father was a marriage counselor until he got divorced. As it turned out, one of those persons was a woman he counseled while he was still working professionally, and stayed in contact with her over the decades, even performing (I think � I can�t be sure, as it�s 12:36 in the morning) her wedding ceremony as he, like myself, have one of those pseudo-ministerships and can legally perform weddings. They�ve stayed in touch all this time, even though they live on the Big Island. At one point, when my father was still in the hospital, and quite frankly, looking near-death, they were one of three people I called to let them know what was going on. Instead of doing the standard speech of how sorry they were to hear about the situation, they jumped on a plane to see him in person. And after we placed him in the care home, they visited again.
That�s when they called me.
�He can�t stay there,� she told me. �He�s obviously miserable, and they don�t care about him.�
This, of course, wasn�t anything new to me. Despite the assurances by the home that they took out all their wards on regular field trips for things like picnics at the beach, he hadn�t left his room in a month.
Actually, that�s wrong. After a bit of prodding, my father remembered that they loaded everybody up to take them to the pharmacy to refill prescriptions. �I asked them if they could stop at my bank so I could have some money in my pocket,� he said, �and the woman told me she wasn�t going to do anything else.�
I gave him some money, even though he didn�t have a wallet and couldn�t go anywhere. It seemed to me that he just wanted to have some sort of illusion that he wasn�t totally helpless.
I let her state her case for getting him out of there, smoking outside of my office while trying to keep moving to avoid 80 percent of the people in the area who spend their entire time, it seems, trying to bum cigarettes off of me. I acknowledged her concerns and I told her about my own qualms about the place. I even threw an inappropriate joke or two into the conversation, because, well, I�m kind of an asshole.
She didn�t laugh.
Finally it got to the question. Twenty years ago, it came in the form of those awesome Twisted Sister videos, where the same guy who played Neidermeyer in Animal House repeated the line, �What do you want to do with your life?� This time, however, it was, �What do you want to do with his life?�
I started to explain that we didn�t have a whole lot of options. He wasn�t ill enough to have to stay in a full-care hospital setting, but he wasn�t well enough to stay by himself, or with me, particularly as I spent most of my time at work.
�Well, that�s why we want to take him,� she said.
My jaw hit the ground. And then there was a scuffle from all the street people clamoring for the cigarette that fell out of my mouth.
She talked for a while about how they had set up a room for her mother when she hit a similar period in her life, and how much the mother liked it. �It�s colder here, as we�re so high in the mountains,� she explained, �but it�s beautiful, and we both love your father, and more important, we understand how he thinks. Obviously, he wouldn�t be right by the beach, which I know he loves, but it�s infinitely better than where he�s at.�
To me, it sounded perfect. They were people who knew him and understood his personality and managed to stick around when he started to go sour. I called my sister to see what she thought.
�I�m worried that they don�t realize what they�re getting into,� she said. �I mean, when we were there, he wasn�t anything like you described, and it was only on those last few days that we began to understand how difficult it his for him to retain any memory.
�And what happens if they bring him over to the Big Island and suddenly realize that they can�t handle him?� she continued. �The only reason he got into that home was because the hospital took charge and found him a place, because it was pretty obvious to them that you weren�t in a position to do it. So if they don�t want them, how are we going to get him placed anywhere else, particularly since he won�t even be on the same island?�
These were all things I had thought of. I knew we had a new editor who was supposed to start at the beginning of February, hopefully taking away from my workload. But the bar was still understaffed, and between the two, it didn�t seem likely that I would be any better at getting the necessary paperwork filled out and turned in than I had been over the past few months, which is to say not good at all. Part of that was sheer workload on my part, but a lot of it was a sheer sense of helplessness that I felt.
Somebody I work with at the bar told me about how they�ve been getting angry at things that shouldn�t matter. I shrugged it off and sang �Sometimes It�s Hard to be a Woman� (which I�m lucky she didn�t kill me for), but since then, I�ve realized that I�ve been doing the same thing. Nearly every time I managed to contact somebody pertinent to my father�s case and hit some wall, I�ve been very close to having some sort of angry emotional meltdown. Consider a month ago, when I finally managed to make it over to the government agency that runs his housing project.
They don�t take phone calls, so everything has to be done in person. I drove over and made my way to the office, only to find the door locked. On the door was a sign that said their hours were from 7:30am to 3:30pm. It was 11:45am, and yet the door was locked and nobody answered when I knocked.
The door had a number to call for appointments, so I called that. I got a recording saying the number was disconnected.
This is a government agency, mind you.
There was another number listed for emergencies. Fuck it, I thought. I�ve been trying to make it here for three months, and I�ve been paying his rent for a place he hasn�t lived in since September. His rent isn�t much, but enough for me to consider it an emergency.
I called the number.
That call went through. I explained my situation to the person on the line, who tried to give me another phone number to call � the same number listed on the door, and the same number that kept coming up as a disconnected line.
�Oh,� the voice on the other line said. �Then you need to go down to the office, it�s down on Aala Street��
�Which is what I�m standing in front of at this very moment,� I said. �The doors are locked, and there�s nobody in there.�
�Oh,� they said helpfully. �There should be somebody there. Try knock on the door.�
�I�ve done that.�
�Try harder,� they said, and hung up.
If nothing else, that�s certainly incentive to knock harder. I pounded the hell out of that door. Then I heard somebody knock away a chair from inside of the office. Finally, this massive Coconut (my co-worker�s derogatory term for big stupid, stereotypical Hawaiians, and being Hawaiian, she�s allowed to say it. She�s also allowed to say big knockers) comes lumbering toward the door, throwing it open.
�Eh, brah, you messing up my lunch!�
�Hey, sorry,� I say, �your head office told me to knock.�
�So? What you want? I eating lunch. Come later.�
�Your sign says you�re open.�
�So?� he says, still blocking the entrance to the office with his fat fucking frame. �What you want?�
I practically doubled over out of anger. I straightened up, fists balled, eyes glaring, teeth clenched. �I want,� I said slowly and emphatically, �to get my dying fucking father out of your stupid fucking housing project so you can let some other asshole move in.�
�Eh, no fucking swear at me brah! Who the fuck are you?�
�Funny, I was just gonna ask you the same fucking thing,� I said. �What�s your name?�
�What�s your name?� he yelled back.
�My name�s Dean Carrico, I�m a reporter with the Honolulu Weekly, and I�m doing a story about government incompetence and corruption.�
He slammed the door in my face. Probably not the best way to handle things on either of our parts.
OK, so that was a hell of a tangent. Fuck you. Anyway, I had my sister talk with them, and she agreed that it was a viable solution, but she was still worried that it would turn out poorly, and then we�d be back to square one.
My father�s friends wanted to get him out as quick as possible, but this was all being planned over Christmas, right before I was planning to fly across the ocean and the U.S. continent to hang out with Kelly�s parents so they could size me up, just at the time that I was getting used to angry emotional outbursts. But that�s another entry.
I got back and told the care home on the fifth of January that we were moving him out at the fifteenth of the month. Of course, the first thing they said was that they needed 30 days notice, and we�d have to pay the full month�s rent. I said we were still giving him his social security check for the month, nearly 800 dollars, but the rest was supposed to be made up by social services. They told me that they had been unable to get his allotment approved by the government agency.
That news story about incompetence was looking better and better.
I explained that this wasn�t my problem. They were in charge of getting that allotment. We had paid the extra amount for the first month, and neither of us had the funds to do it again. The caregiver admitted defeat and said he would just take the $800 from my father�s social security.
By the way, after we moved him out, the Social Security allotment came through which they are now demanding back as he no longer lives there. Their allotment was an additional $500 dollars, meaning that first month that we paid for, that which we were charged an extra $700 by the care home, which we had no choice but to pay, was nothing but extortion, taking advantage of people in a bad situation.
Yeah, this fucking story is looking more and more like Pulitzer material.
The two weeks to prepare getting him out went by quickly. Kelly came over and brought him to his old apartment to help him pack, but he wasn�t interested in keeping anything. Nearly everything he wanted fit into one suitcase, which he kept packed and by the edge of the door, awaiting his rescue. On the day of the transfer, which happened to be the same day as the newspaper goes to press, meaning I had to be there, the woman essentially adopting my father got lost picking him up, and by the time had straightened herself out only had time to rush him to the airport. I didn�t even get to see him before he left.
In the meantime, I got the intent to vacate paperwork turned into the agency, and I�ve been clearing out his house. He doesn�t have a lot of things, but it�s an incredibly slow process, partly because of the sentimental aspect. You pick something up, and then start paging through to see what he�s saved, also to see what he was willing to leave behind. There�s dozens of articles that I�ve written for various magazines. My book. Two tapes of stuff from my first band (no, Brian, the �Never Trust a Preacher with a Boner� demo tape isn�t there, though I looked for it. This is just where we stuck a tape player in the middle of the floor and played. We sound fucking awful.) There are pictures of myself and my sister as kids. Cards and letters from friends and family. Old jewelry including his wedding band, which I�m currently wearing on my pinky finger, which means either he had incredibly tiny hands, or I�m a fat fuck.
The entire time I�m clearing things out, putting things he might still want into beer boxes brought from the bar, slipping other things in a bag marked for Goodwill and the rest into large trash bags destined for the garbarge, I can�t get Tom Waits out of my head.
- Davenports and kettle drums, swallow-tail coats
Tablecloths and patent leather shoes
Bathing suits and bowling balls, clarinets and rings
All this radio really needs is a fuse
A tinker, a tailor, a soldier�s things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
And this one is for bravery, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this boxCuff links and hub caps
Trophies and paperbacks
It's good transportation, but the brakes aren't so hot
Neckties and boxing gloves
This jackknife is rusted
You can pound that dent out on the hood
A tinker, a tailor, a soldier�s things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
Oh, and this one is for bravery, oh, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box
I�m finding most of these things, except for the car, the rifle, and the boots. I even found a dollar in a box. And then there are some of the other things he�s saved over the years. A box full of wrapping paper. A yogurt container full of shells and rocks. A box full of nails, washers and screws. A band saw. Then there�s this, something that I�d forgotten about but it's probably the ultimate proof besides the wheat germ on ice cream thing that showed why hippies are bad and I hate them. After all, most phobias and stereotypes stem from childhood trauma, right? I give you: The outfit:
No, no, don't rush down to your local Goodwill to try and pick this up. This outfit, I'm burning.
Meanwhile, the editor started in her position, and yet I�m still working just as much and possibly more hours, trying to help her get up to speed on how our newspaper works. I�m trying to figure out time where I can go visit, if only for the weekend, but time keeps getting away from me as I don�t get out of the office until the wee late hours.
A month passes, and I haven�t even spoken with him. It�s reminiscent of when I lost contact when I was an adolescent and was spending all my time with the band and generally trying to have my own life, while feeling bad about not making contact, yet still putting it off until I have some big news to tell him, which would always pass and then move on to the next big thing.
And then we get the call. It�s not working. They�re wondering when we can take him back.
And me, I�m pissed at not having the presence of mind to have said �no takebacksies.�
Fuck.
And now after loading the picture, it�s 3:40am.
