Detailing, An Alzheimer's Tale

  Title Page & Licensing Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Detailing, an Alzheimer’s Tale

  Title Page & Licensing Notes

  Detailing, an Alzheimer’s Tale

  By Thomas M. McDade

  Copyright 2015 Thomas M. McDade

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  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks Serala Press, Oakland, CA (1987) and Lompico Creek Press, Felton, CA (2002) for previously publishing this story in Love Is Ageless: Stories about Alzheimer's Disease; edited by Jessica Bryan

  I’m also very grateful to Jacqueline Johnson Munson for supplying the cover photo.

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  The hitchhiker said little and conversation was the reason Jeff stopped for him. The radio didn’t work and he was lonely as hell. Jeff was driving from Providence to Denver in a ’55 Ford, a seventy-five-dollar purchase. Just before the passenger dozed off, he did mention his current employment along with some advice. “Don’t ever work in a fertilizer factory if you can help it,” he said. Jeff had no plans to.

  Just a local trip now, a far yelp from that trek west but looking into the comforting blue sky Jeff sees the hitchhiker step away from the ailing two-tone blue Ford onto the I-80 Iowa highway. It’s a good thing the daydream ended when it did or Jeff would have run into the car ahead of him. So far, he’s had to slam on the brakes a number of times. He resolves to keep his mind and eyes on his driving, resist fleeing from the present to the trivial details of his past.

  Jeff’s Impala is new and the radio is top notch. Switching on the ballgame, he follows the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt, stopping at every horsehide stitch. The announcer say Witt’s fastball is a thing to behold; batters are looking at a pill. What a coincidence, pills are involved in Jeff’s mission, but he can’t dwell on them. He takes his mind off the sutures and all the major league autographs of his boyhood fill the ball until it turns as blue as an umpire’s cap. He’s lying. He had just one signature, hurler Nelson Chittum. Jim Rice grounds into a double play. Jeff pictures his father’s told-you-so shaking head. The radio station identifies itself.

  Jeff studies the license plate on the Buick in front of him. Like a child playing a traveling game on a long vacation drive, he adds numbers and attaches words to letters. He wonders whether it was a murderer doing life made the tag or if that type of prison labor a myth. Is Jeff looking at tomorrow’s daily number? He counts the rust spots on the bumper.

  He read somewhere that killers are often obsessed with trivial details. Their minds fly from thoughts that might spark remorse or regret. They play tyke’s games, might connect sidewalk molecules to walls or clouds and affix those on floors to people, like dots in a playbook puzzler. They don’t stare at any spot too long. An upsetting image might appear, gun, knife or corpse hiding in a passing cloud. At times, they slam their eyes shut, study the flashing colors and stars. Seeking sleep, they hope for fleeting dreams with safer details like soothing fingers that tend to turn however into furiously mutilating fishhooks. Yet the same barbs occasionally spread themselves on desperately imagined skies, and back to back, they are distant birds carrying forgiveness in their claws and beaks. Tossing, turning, tugging blankets, spreads and sheets all images return to decimal points like pills lined up for overdosing.

  Jeff is no criminal, but he’s made his first connection with death. In his pocket sits a deed to his father’s gravesite in the V.A. Cemetery. He’s finally a landowner! Attached to the document is a reservation for Jeff’s mother! A Reservation, as if she’s scheduled to dine at a fine restaurant or fly off to Samoa. Jeff hasn’t been to the cemetery since the hearse delivered the old man; nor has he visited his mother in the nursing home.

  Today he will see her. How many tears are left? Maybe none will be necessary. Jeff has a bottle of pills in his pocket. A remedy advertised in the back pages of a health magazine. The ad claims the product will restore memory. Jeff immediately and frantically called in an order. He wonders how many other sons purchased the same hope. He switches stations searching for classical music that will transport him to some distant shore where he can count the waves and gull cries. He recalls writing a paper on Debussy’s Le Mer for Music Appreciation 101. He finds none; settles for a Million Dollar Weekend. The Beatles sing about being sixty-four. The car in front of him turns left supplying a new license plate to consider. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a Texaco station landmark that warns he is near. If he can locate a distracting detail he might miss the turn, grant himself a reprieve. He loses. Spotting a housing Project on the left, he turns the corner. The blocks are different from the ones he’s known. There are wooden buildings among the shiny brick structures. The development could be confused with “normal” apartments. Baxter Nursing Home stands across the street. It’s made of the same dull, old factory brick as the Project where Jeff grew up. His mother escaped Project life, had seventeen years in a second floor rental on the “other side” of the tracks, literally. Surrounded by brick again, she’s an ember in a kiln.

  No, they don’t make Housing Projects the way they used to. Maybe they don’t make sons the way they used to either. Jeff goes back to the ballgame. Perhaps the pills have lost their potency; three homers reported. He parks next to a rattletrap like one his

  father owned. He admires his Impala’s lustrous finish. It enjoyed a deluxe washing an hour ago.

  A lump is visits his throat. He remembers a movie where Michael Caine beat a brainwashing attempt by digging a nail into his palm. Jeff’s detail ruses are as ineffective as the pitched balls that fled Fenway. Neither nail nor railroad spike could work. He’s sure or it. He wishes he’d felt all of this sympathy for her when growing up.

  In the lobby, there is a guest book. Swept back in time, he’s logging in as Petty Officer of the Watch on his old ship, DD-944. Room number 404 and 944 sure does make Daily Number sense. His father’s pet number 113 was part of his Army service digits. Look at a brighter side, signing into an art gallery opening. The nurse behind the Plexiglas hits the buzzer and Jeff’s admitted. A prison door slamming behind him would afford more comfort. Ahead is a chapel. He catches sight of stained glass comforting the sunlight or vice versa. The colors remind him of ones above the Stations of the Cross in his childhood church, and he remembers his attention grabbing all those hues, occasionally returning for the music: color and music, music and color and a nun’s slap. “At the cross her station keeping…”

  The elevator opens and Jeff steps into its cell. He shuts his eyes and imagines a prisoner doing reverent pushups in front of a pinup while scheming to sabotage license plates with obscenities or simply break out. Seconds later, Jeff’s reading the emergency instructions framed on the wall. The elevator jerks to a halt and he experiences a touch of roller coaster. Is that what death feels like? As the door opens, two flies exit ahead of him.

  An old man, dapper in a bowtie and straw hat, explains to a nurse that he had no intention of leaving. He just happened to be passing the elevator. When she turns and walks away, he wrinkles up his lips like twisted rubber bands and launches a gob of spit at her. It lands on his shoe. Down the hall, Jeff sees a woman who might weigh sixty pounds sitting in a wheelchair eating lunch, plate heaped with food. She takes a piece of meat in her fingers and picks from the gristle. Beside her are two finches in a cage.

  A tough-looking nurse arrives at her station. When she last combed her hair, she might have had tall country music coiffeur in mind, but didn’t follow through. She’s from outer space. When Jeff requests the number of his mother’s room she holds her cigarette between her teeth, pulls back
her lips and directs him to 404. On the way down the hall, a woman approaches, asks for a cigarette. She’s as skinny as the Bird Lady. Her face is a crumpled milkweed pod. When Jeff hands over a dollar, she takes it, suspicion filling her forehead grooves. He doesn’t know how much cigarettes cost. He hasn’t smoked since quitting a pipe on a Navy night, steaming near Messina, Sicily. He’d had enough burnt mouth. Tossing it over the side, he thought the ship’s wake sucking it under was a fitting turnabout. He should have given the Pod Woman another buck.

  Jeff’s mother is awake on her jacked up mattress. She stares at the closet. He kisses her and smiles.