The Price Of Dick (18 page)

Sometime after one in the morning I heard the sound of a key scraping the lock, missing and trying again. I got up,
pulled open the door to find Dick standing outside. He was dressed in the sweats and T-shirt his parents had picked up earlier for him. By his crossed-eyes, crooked smile and wavering hand holding the wrong key, I could determine he was drunk. He didn’t look well either. Very pale face, dark circles under his eyes, lips just a shade too blue. It must have been one hell of a night of drinking. I would have found his predicament amusing if I weren't aware that he’d been behind the wheel of the car driving from his parents' to the apartment. Chewing him out would have been pointless. To make a point, a person has to be capable of understanding the point. He was beyond that capacity.

He stumbled past me into the living room. He tumbled to the sofa like someone had taken the wrong
Jenga block from his body. He began laughing.

“
I thought you were staying at your folks house tonight?” It was both a question and a statement.

His hands flew up wildly in the air.
“I’m adopted. I know it. That place is filled with crazy people.”

No disagreement from me.

“This was ‘sposed to be a celebration for my triathlon. By the way, I came in tenth in my age group out of over one hundred and fifty. You shoulda been there. I was hoping you’d be there.”

I congratulated him. Reiterated the whole flat tire lie.

“She did have some good food, I’ll give her that. Mom puts on a good spread. I think it’s part of their brainwashing technique. Get to a man’s brain through his stomach. Or something like that.”

I went to the kitchen to make some coffee. He went
on as I knew he would. Drunks do that a lot. Especially a drunk Dick. “She didn’t waste much time before talking to everyone and telling them how to vote. You’d think the Republican Party was the dinosaurs on the verge of extinction they way she tries to recruit.”

I wasn
’t going to tell him how I wished that political party would fall into a tar pit.

“
Then she privately drilled each one of them about you, trying to find out as much as they know about you.”

I peeked around the kitchen door back at him.
“You’re kidding.”

He made an exaggerated gesture with his head.
“Nope. She seems to think you’re some creepy, child-raping pervert. She really hated our place. Called it a pigsty. Said we live in filth. That you haven’t got any manners.” That brought a chuckle from him. “And then she tried to persuade me to move back home. Didn’t even ream me for drinking too much, or cursing. I bet that twisted her twat in a knot.” This time he pushed his head into the pillow for a belly laugh. When he came back out, I could see his pallor had worsened. “You know what’s funny? She was standing right next to me today after the triathlon and I’m checking out the dudes. There was a lot of hot fuckable dudes at this thing today. Ain’t nothing like seeing them cram all that hunk junk into wetsuits to make your dick twitch.” His laughter was on a roll. He couldn’t stop finding humor in everything he said.

I poured myself a cup of coffee before the maker finished perking.
“I’ll say she seems to be a fairly single-minded person.” That was the kindest way I could say anything about her.

“
Yeah. I can’t figure out what happened to her. They told me she wasn’t even Catholic or a Republican until she met my dad. She found out he was and she converted when she started to date him. But it’s like it completely took over her whole life. She was even a teacher in the Catholic school I went to for years until she retired to start doing this super radical pro-life stuff for the church.” He looked at my cup as if he was debating having one himself, belched and then turned away. “Now my dad tells me she’s actually thinking of running for political office. Can you imagine my mom in politics? Sieg Heil, man.”

If that didn
’t turn blood into ice chunks nothing would.

He rubbed his head.
“Damn, is it hot in here?” he asked, his eyes looking more bloodshot. He began stripping out of his sweats to his underwear. The temperature felt comfortable to me. But I would get blood surges if I drank vodka. I suspected he was feeling the effects of the alcohol.

He went on
, “I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if I wasn’t born into that family. What would I have been like? I feel like...” He looked at me and his reddened eyes appeared far away. “I feel like as long as she’s alive I’ve got this noose around my neck with her yanking it tighter. Like she’s strangling the life out of me. She wants everyone to think she’s the ultimate mom, but she’s...”

That sentence just drifted away on him. I had a million answers to fill in the blank. None gentlemanly.

When I returned from getting my second cup of coffee, he was nose down, snoring. For the first time in ages, I slept in my old bed.

*  *  *

It was loud coughing that jarred me from my sleep. At first, I was disoriented. Then it sunk in. My old bed. My old room. After a few minutes the ruckus died away. I laid back down to return to slumberland. Then it began again, lasted much longer; sounded worse. He groaned, trying to catch his breath, wheezed, and began hacking again. It sounded like a really bad case of flu. I’d never seen anyone catch it that quickly, or its symptoms accelerate that fast. Grudgingly, I pulled myself from the cozy comfort of the land of promised dreams and stumbled through the darkness to the living room.

I blinked against the sudden harsh
light from the lamp he’d turned on, and found him seated on the edge of the sofa, hunched over, arms crossed against his chest. He looked at me with Dracula eyes. So blood-colored they made mine water in sympathy.

“
You all right?” Stupid question once I saw his waxen complexion.

“
I think I caught a bug,” he said, gulping for air between words. “Can’t stop this cough. Burns like hell and I can’t breathe. You got anything in the medicine cabinet I can take for it?’

We actually had every non-prescription pill imaginable in that cabinet. I brought the lot and handed them to him so he could match a label to his
symptoms. I gave him a tall glass of water to wash them down. A tremor shook his hand as he took the glass from me. He looked terrible.

When the
coughing began again it sounded tight. He hacked up bloody mucus, spit it into some tissues. Each bout faded the natural color of his skin to a paler shade.

“
Do you want to go to the emergency room?” I asked. Those were the words no guy liked to hear. All men possess a natural fear of hospitals and believe we are only a few seconds from being just fine. It takes something big to scare us enough to consider the hospital an option. So I was surprised when he said, "Let me see if this works first,” and he swallowed a couple of the pills. Even that looked agonizing.

He curled himself into a ball with a pillow between his legs on the couch. I could see the veins in his temples and forehead stand in relief beneath the colorless skin.

Yawning, I made more coffee. It was almost four in the morning. I sighed as he began coughing again. Nonstop. It was going to be a long night. I walked back into the living room to find him with a full arm-lock around his chest, bent, tears spilling off his face. He tried to stand to catch his breath. I saw his eyes roll upward, Linda Blair-style. I ran forward just in time to catch him as he fainted. I cushioned his fall—his dense body weight dragged me to the floor under him. It terrified me beyond words. I’d never seen anyone pass out, much less a big, sturdy young man who’d just competed that morning in a triathlon. This made no sense.

He didn
’t stay out long. Just enough to shock me into action. I had to get him to the hospital. He didn’t argue with me this time. I helped him get dressed. Half an hour and many broken speed limits later, we were sitting in Mercy Central's emergency room. I was filling out his paperwork when he passed out again in the chair in the waiting area. Dropping everything, I managed to catch him by the shirt collar to keep his head from striking the floor. Seconds later the attendants had him on a gurney, wheeling him through the doors to the examination room.

A few minutes later another doctor approached me.
“Are you his next of kin?” he asked. I told him I wasn’t. He informed me I needed to get a family member there ASAP to sign him in for overnight observation.

My heart sank.
I had to call his mother. The awkward beginning of the call changed quickly to alarm, concern and action as I could hear her yell instructions to her husband. They were in the emergency room in less than thirty minutes. Once I was spotted, they bee-lined to me. They both had sleep-crumpled faces, but she had taken the time to run a brush through her hair. Her husband looked like he’d stepped out of a wind tunnel. At a bar. That served strong liquor. I could smell his breath standing three feet away. I told them everything I knew. She strode toward the reception desk. Not long afterwards a doctor joined them and took them through the electronic doors to their son.

I paced a circle for what seemed forever in the over
-lit space before his dad finally found me. They’d be keeping Dick overnight. They didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him, but his liver enzymes were way off, and they thought he’d caught a bacteriological infection of some sort. I was surprised when his dad actually took my cell number and promised to call me if they got any news. They’d stay with him and I could go back home. He thanked me with a handshake. His face looked like a sad bloodhound.

Dawn streaked blue and orange across the
sky by the time I made it back to the apartment. I removed all the blankets, bed sheets and pillowcases he’d slept on for washing, and then sprayed the sofa with disinfectant. Then I fell asleep in my office chair wondering what the hell could make a healthy man that sick so fast?

I awakened
later that morning feeling like a contortionist. My neck was twisted with knots. I stretched and checked my phone. One message. It was from Dick’s father. They had taken him to ICU. He’d fallen into a coma overnight.

Concussive explosions went off in my brain. I thought I
’d heard the message wrong; replayed it and found it more horrifying with its confirmation. I turned two circles in the shower and then dived into some fresh clothes.

I hate the smell of hospitals. It
’s that mixture of sickness and cleanliness that assails the nostrils. I made my way to the top floor Intensive Care Unit. I’d been included on the ICU list as a family member. I’d no clue who had done that, but my bet was on Dick’s dad. I made my way to the glass-enclosed room. I could see the bed and the surrounding medical equipment that dominated every inch of that small space. It made a big man look small; he was strapped in the center of all this, seemingly wired to it with tubes going in and out of him. He was unconscious. His skin looked translucent in the fluorescent light. His parents were seated on either side of him as I entered. Except for the sound of the machinery breathing for him and the beeping of the heart monitor, there was reverent silence. His parents looked up at me with tired eyes devoid of malice. It was the first time I had seen their eyes that way.

This was unbelievable. I wanted to know what happened. How a
n exceptionally healthy young man in his twenties could suddenly, overnight, become comatose?

His mother reached out and touched her son
’s hand. She looked drained. “They don’t know. They’ve been running tests. He just went like this about an hour after we got here last night. They think he may have come in contact with something foreign in the lake water at the triathlon that sent his immune system into either an overdrive or a shutdown.” There was a notebook on her lap. Her hand came back and touched this. “I’m going to keep a diary of everything.”

I thought that a bit weird and obsessive but said nothing.

It was a stupid question to ask, but somehow in situations like this, we always ask them. “Do they know how long it will last?”

“
They’re running tests on his blood.”

I heard a sob from his father. He blew his nose into a handkerchief to cover it. That was an answer in itself
and it chilled me through.

I felt numb. I sat down in the chair next to his father and looked at Dick wired to the machinery, his chest rising and falling
evenly and in synch with each hissing pump of the equipment. I’d heard of people experiencing a waking nightmare. This, I thought, was that.

*  *  *

The world became a disjointed string of events those next few weeks. Nothing ever seemed to be connected to reality or normal life. I went about my work like a mindless robot, before ending my day at the hospital sitting in a room with Dick. Each day he grew thinner and whiter. I was daily parking my butt in the midst of the enemy camp under a truce forged by our mutual concern and disbelief. I pondered life in a manner I never had before.

It seemed every
day we filled our precious moments with so many petty things. Jealousies, hatreds, resentments. We cram our lives with ugly thoughts and emotions rather than really trying to enjoy anything. All of us sit in some oblivious self-absorbed, self-important space thinking that everything will go on as usual; everyday we’ll wake up and have the same luxuries that life has always afforded us, without realizing sometimes the opposite is less than an eye blink away. We are all one merciless accident away from being road kill. You’d think we’d learn to be nice, to smile a bit, to celebrate not just small victories but all victories.

His mother and I shared his room in silence, bound together by exactly the same emotions. By the third week, I could tell the doctor was no longer optimistic. His mother
’s bedside diary had spilled over into a second notebook. She recorded every time he blinked, each time a nurse changed a bag, temperature changes; when he got a sponge bath. In between, when she was at home rather than bedside, she wrote small prayers. I caught glimpses of it all when she fell asleep with the notebook open in her lap. I thought maybe that was her way of tying the knot to hang on at the end of her rope.

Whatever Dick had come down
with had completely debilitated his system. The doctors really didn’t know what it was. That was truly scary.

We always think doctors have an answer; that if they don
’t, there’s a book where they can go to look it up. We think they have magic pills, elixirs, or machines that can take the bad out and put the good back in, and all will be well. They listed and referred to it as a pneumonia, but couldn’t scientifically confirm the diagnosis. It certainly seemed much worse. He’d quickly lost enough weight to look skeletal. His virility had wasted away until his skin looked like parchment stretched over bones. We could see the shape of his teeth through his lips. He was ice-cold to the touch.

I never shook the shock of it all. I roamed the empty halls of my head as I sat with his father in the cafeteria eating pie. We made conversation about the pie.
About pies in general. About anything but the fear that was chasing us in those hallways in our heads. Countless times I kicked myself for the anger I held, tooth and claw, over the lost vacation to Puerto Vallarta. It seemed kind of petty knowing that a short time afterward he’d be at death’s door. I wasn’t begrudging him that vacation any more.

If there was any comic relief during those weeks of Dick
’s hospitalization, it came in one gargantuan jaw-dropping surprise that could have been stolen from a Monty Python skit for the theater of the absurd.

It began
innocuously with anonymous phone calls. Not just to me. But, as I would also learn, to all the members of Dick’s family. As in time of all calamities or tragedies, few of us respond to phone calls that don’t relate specifically to the persons involved. As for myself, if I don’t recognize a number, I generally let voice mail take it. These bizarre phone calls to all of us who received them came consistently from one number at various times of the day. I put it down to one persistent solicitor.

I seriously doubt I
’d have puzzled anything together if it hadn’t been for that hospital pie. While Dick’s nurses gave him a sponge bath and changed his bed, his two brothers and I adjourned to the cafeteria for another piece of the apple pie that was as tall as cake and as wide as its plate. As we sat, all three of us pulled our cell phones from our pockets and placed them on the table next to our plates. It was a habit we’d acquired during Dick’s hospitalization. If something happened, one notification could get us all expediently back to his room.

During our pie break, the musical began. First
one brother’s phone rang. He checked the number; hit the end call button and placed the phone back on the table. Five seconds later, the other brother’s phone rang. He checked the number, pressed the same end call button and placed his on the table. Then five seconds later, mine rang. We glanced at each other in unison. Cue suspenseful music. I looked at my number, recognized the unidentified one that had been calling me nonstop for the past few weeks. I turned the display around and showed it to the two brothers. They picked up their phones hit the last call display button. We found each of us had the mystery number.

The brother
to my left said, “I answered it once. It sounded like some crazy friend of his who was trying to weasel his way in to see him here. I told him it was family only. Then I just started ignoring the calls.”

“
It was a guy?” I asked.

“
Yep. He said his name was Walsh. Do you know him?”

The name didn
’t ring a bell off hand. “Not that I know. The name isn’t familiar.” But in the back of my mind there was a small jingle. “Walsh,” I repeated. Still nothing but a nagging feeling. I suspected it was a colleague from work, or one of his clients. Whoever it was, he was determined.

My curiosity was piqued by the fact that he was doing the round robin of calls in a matter of seconds to all of us. Somehow he had all of our numbers and I didn
’t know how that could be. Dick’s family and I didn’t have mutual friends. I felt inclined to answer the next time he called.

By late evening I made it back to the apartment. James Bond I was not because I didn
’t notice the car in the slot next to mine in the apartment lot, or the man waiting inside it glowing in green dashboard lights. He startled me as his door flung open and he sprung up to face me. It was the old man stalker who used to watch Dick through the apartment gym window. The loon that Dick had claimed to have turned into a client with his winning ways. It was then the unrecognized, but familiar name of Walsh attached itself to a face. He was standing in front of me. He looked haggard and desperate; a tad disheveled, shirt misbuttoned, but still wearing a suit.

“
Mr. Walsh,” I stated his name aloud just to confirm I was right in my assumption.

“
You know who I am?” He seemed both astonished and relieved.

“
You’re one of Dick’s clients,” I said.

“
I’m his boyfriend. His betrothed!” He spat out the unlikely combination of words. They refused to go together in my head. From Will Ferrell’s mouth they’d have been hilarious. Coming out of Walsh’s they echoed the Outer Limits.

I fought the urge to laugh out loud, and then saw he was being serious.
“Excuse me?”

“
Oh don’t worry I’m not going to tell his family. He told me what they’re like. It’s been our secret this past year. But I know you understand him and you’ll help me get on the list to see him. I’m dying not knowing how he’s doing. The hospital won’t give me any information. No one will answer my calls. I’m desperate. You’ve got to help me. I love him!”

The illumination in the lot did nothing to
improve the sagging features of his seventy-year old face. If bewilderment had a color, a broad brush just painted me with it as I stared at him.

I battled a disbelieving smirk.
“You two are lovers?”

He looked indignant.
Then proud. “But of course we’re lovers. We just celebrated our six-month anniversary a few months ago. He took me on a trip to Puerto Vallarta!”

There was an unseen upper cut to the jaw that blindsided me. I leaned back on the car for support.
“Puerto Vallarta? The trip he won?” He was the voice on the other end of the late-night phone call that had sent me screaming to the park. Not what I imagined.

“
Of course. How do you think he won it?” His manner suggested these were facts that should be common knowledge to me. “I was instrumental in changing his career. I found him enough prominent people to make investments with him that he’ll be able to buy us a nice house in the suburbs. We’ve been looking at real estate.” His bagged, weak-colored eyes looked ecstatic. “I made sure he’s going to be a very wealthy man with all those contacts.”

It had been a long day. My brain was too tired to grasp the bizarre storyline of this outlandish conversation. I felt like a cartoon character
who had stepped off the cliff but hadn’t fallen just yet. “A house?” Even that question didn’t sound real. I couldn’t picture the two of them in suburban wedded bliss. They’d certainly never find appropriate figureheads for the wedding cake. Unless, of course, they were figurines of a groom and Death.

Lights droned in the mo
onless, autumn night, casting us in unreal pools of blue. I grew cold in the seasonal chill and shivered.

Walsh was getting annoyed with me.
“Yes. We’re going to go up east to get married first. In one of those states where they allow same sex marriage. I love him. He’s my life; my everything. I can’t stand being away from him.” He sounded as if he’d burst into tears at any moment. He was earnest, but it still seemed both comedic and tragic.

“
Married? He asked you to marry him?” Each revelation took us deeper into the rabbit hole of madness.

He held up his left hand, waggled a decrepit finger. There was a thin, gold band on his third finger.
“Yes. He proposed to me in Puerto Vallarta in our room. It was quite beautiful. He was in his trunks. We’d just come in from the beach. I thought he was joking at first. Then I thought he was drunk. But it was all quite real, and touching. He put this very ring on my finger and professed his love to me.”

That completed the fall off the cliff. I hit the bottom with a
bone-jarring thud. I stared at the frail man who looked ancient enough to have dust in his veins, saw the sincerity in his eyes, and felt the full crash of insanity upon me. I couldn’t imagine Dick purposely getting himself in this situation. My mind put up common sense roadblocks everywhere.

Willie Brandt had been right about my friend. Flimflam man. That was the term he used. There were other words:
cheater, charlatan, liar, con artist. He was all of those things. Nothing rang honest in what he’d done to this old man. He played him, probably swindled him and would have hung him out to dry and evaporate like so many senior citizens who got taken by grifters. No one would have heard from him again...if Dick hadn’t fallen ill. The one thing I never believed was that he had any intention of marrying Walsh and moving in together. I’d been hard enough to explain to his mother.