Truth in Advertising Page 0,66

say that, but I’m drunk and I’m riding in a Maybach.”

“Fin. I like you, even though you are not best writer.”

“I like you, too, even though your title means nothing. But I have to go home now. My father is dying.”

He turns to me, suddenly serious. “Fin. This is a tragedy. He is a very great man, your father?”

“No. He’s just a regular man.”

“You admire your father? You learn much from him?”

“I once whined to a therapist that my father never taught me anything. The therapist said, ‘You’re wrong. Your father taught you everything.’”

Keita considers this a moment. Or not. He could be drifting. Although he seems to have a remarkable ability to remain reasonably sober.

“Fin,” Keita says in a stage whisper, “my father is a very great man. Very great. He say to me, he say, ‘You are weak and you must be strong. You are ordinary and you must be great.’ He is a very great man, my father.”

He sounds like a dick.

Keita says, “Fin. Do you love your father?”

“No. I hate him, actually.”

He smiles. “Me, too.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR

I walk down the hall in the ICU toward the nurses station, where four of them are huddled together. I hear one nurse say, “And the patient says, ‘What’s the bad news?’ And the doctor says, ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for twenty-four hours.’ ” They all laugh loudly.

One finally turns to me. Her expression suggests she’s annoyed to find me standing there.

“What’s the hardest part about rollerblading?” I say.

“Excuse me?”

The other three nurses have turned, the same mildly annoyed expressions.

“What’s the hardest part about rollerblading?” Expressions that suggest confusion now.

I say, “Telling your father you’re gay.”

They think on it for a moment and one laughs.

“I’m here to see Edward Dolan,” I say.

The one who laughs shows me to his room. I ask if Margaret is on duty, but the nurse—Beverly—tells me that Margaret doesn’t work the ICU. We look at my father, who has more machines around him that go beep and hiss. More tubes. There is a strip of white tape on either side of his mouth holding a tube in. There has to be a more dignified way to die.

“How bad is it?” I ask, thinking immediately that I sound like someone in a TV show.

“He’s not good.”

For some reason this annoys me. Give me facts. Give me data that I don’t fully understand. Give me something.

“I understand that, but is there a time or . . .”

“We couldn’t know that. I’m sorry. The doctor will be around later.”

The room is darker than the other room. Is it mood lighting, to suggest the severity of the situation? Is it to save money on the nearly dead? He looks helpless. He looks like a very old man. He looks like a baby. And just that fast, just that vividly, I remember the reject baseball glove.

My mother collected S&H Green Stamps, spending evenings after dinner and the dishes, a cup of tea, a Pall Mall, my father reading the Record American with the radio on—the Bruins game, the Red Sox—pasting in page after page of Green Stamps. Those rare times when it was good. I was starting Little League. She used the stamps to get me a glove. The model was called a Regent. Other kids had a Spalding or Wilson or Rawlings. Who’d ever heard of a Regent? I was only mildly disappointed, until Eddie Wyzbiki saw it and made fun of it. “Look at Dolan’s glove! It’s a Reeeee-ject!” He pulled it out of my hand, ran around. “Reject!” He was much bigger and I defended myself nicely by bursting into tears, red-faced, ears burning. I told my mother, who told my father. I was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. I was terrified he’d scream, blame me for crying, being a little weasel. I was waiting for the explosion. In the evening he would shower and afterwards he smelled of Bay Rum.

He sat down opposite me.

“Look at me,” he said. My mother off to one side, biting a corner of her mouth.

I was trying hard not to cry. My ears ached.

He said, “People say foolish things.” He shook his head. “It means they don’t like themselves. It’s means they are afraid. That boy. He’s just afraid. Feel sorry for people who say mean things.”

Later, we drove for an ice cream, just me and him, my father humming to the radio.

• • •

I call Eddie from the cafeteria, hoping it will go directly to