Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
their feathers off, and then we eviscerated them, sticking our hands into their body cavities and pulling out everything that was not meat or bone.
There is a point at which chores become farming. I tried driving a tractor twice, sitting up on the high, vulnerable seat, coordinating the release of the clutch and the jabbing of the gearshift. But I never really got the hang of it, and I was, in effect, excused. The decision to not push me to learn farming was an act of kindness, because I wasn’t any good at it. I lived on a farm, yet I would never be a farmer. But it was also an act of despair. The family didn’t want me to apprentice for a job that wouldn’t exist.
By now, Dad had undergone several surgeries, and every surgery is a story. A product designer I would meet in 2000 who had devoted his professional life to building surgical tables would tell me, “There is no such thing as minor surgery.”
In this story, the hero is my father. He takes his luggage—which my mother packed—and is driven to the hospital. He walks on crutches or a cane, depending on how bad things have become. He answers questions on forms. He hobbles down the telescoping, fluorescent halls of a hospital. He has made this trip so often that the nurses know him, but this probably both comforts and disturbs him. Perhaps he is as sadly jaunty as a friend of mine who, spending weeks on the road launching a business, would announce as he entered hotel lobbies, “Honey, I’m home.”
Dad checks into a room with nothing but a bedside table and a TV. There’s a stranger in the other bed. The floors are linoleum. After Dad gets into his bed, a nurse pops up the rails on either side and gives him the call light that connects him to her. Mom unpacks his luggage and kisses him good-bye.
That next morning, Dad wakes up alone. He becomes an object. He is washed, and his body is shaved. He is wheeled—lying flat on his back, the halls of the hospital helplessly streaming by—to the operating room.
The next room is even brighter and cleaner than the rest of the hospital. People in green masks calm him, then speak to their peers as if he weren’t there. The story shifts to an even more impersonal third person, which I imagine hardens in him: “The patient is a forty-five-year-old male. He has an extensive history …” On his back, he feels disembodied, but all he can think of is how his body will be sliced. He looks up. He floats and thinks of death. The doctor’s masked face enters his field of vision. “We’re going to apply the anesthesia now,” he explains. A breathing mask clamps onto my dad’s face. He inhales, and soon the world disappears.
When Dad returned from the hospital, he displayed the discarded hip socket on the living room bureau beside other sockets from other operations. If you did not know their source, the metal objects on the mantel were beautiful. They shined; they lolled; they were made of the finest stainless steel; they had been made with great care for a serious purpose.
The whole living room was a festival of bad taste. A 3-D diorama of Christ hung on the living room wall. Look at the diorama one way, Christ suffered on the cross. Move your head: Christ ascended into heaven. A beige knitted cozy transformed a brandy bottle into a dog standing on its hind legs with buttons for eyes. Dad loved kitsch with the enthusiasm of a man who had never heard the word kitsch; he loved it without even bothering to ante up the toll that irony invariably pays to taste. He sang novelty songs to us: “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose,” “Tennessee Bird Walk,” stuff like that. He bought an Indian headdress made out of artificially red, yellow, and green feathers and talked my mom into photographing him in it.
Dad cared about style, and this had something to do with his sickness. Fashion covers up wounds; fashion asserts that the self is more than its scars and its sores. Of course, there were the starched shirts. Cuff links winked on his nightstand. When he went into Winona, he wore a tie and often a sport coat. As the sixties expanded the palette available to men, he started buying socks in Day-Glo pastels: lime, salmon. He wore pink shirts under tan sport coats. He scented himself with Old Spice, Hai Karate, or Brut. It wasn’t expensive cologne because we didn’t have access to those kinds of stores. He disciplined his hair with Brylcreem and his whiskers with Aqua Velva. He smoked cigars, which, as any man who has smoked one knows, are part experience, part accessory, and part fragrance. He was fighting the good fight against nakedness and sickness and entropy.
When Dad was in the hospital, Dennis was left to run the farm. The tractor often broke down. Dennis spent hours in the field trying desperately to fix it, and no neighbor ventured over to help. Would the son of a Speltz or a Kreidemacher have felt so isolated? Probably not. But were men who may not have even seen Dennis struggling and who had their own farms to run obliged to come to our family’s aid? Dad’s sense of grievance is hard to defend.
But the resentment was real. I am now much closer to my father in age. I understand adult anger—the anger of ongoing frustration, the anger of those not-allowed tantrums, the anger of resentment and politics and agendas. And I know that the source of my anger and the object of my anger are often two different things. When I wake up in the morning and I have a deadline that I am afraid of missing, I have rabid political thoughts until I meet the deadline, even though the task weighing on me has nothing to do with politics, even though I’m writing a brochure for office equipment. I’m not without self-knowledge, but I’m unable to stop this strange, savage refraction. And if my father was like me, his emotional metabolism transformed the fear he felt as he lay alone in his hospital bed into anger, because anger is a more desirable emotion. It is more justice-tinged, more active, more hopeful of change, more muscular and masculine. Anger always feels as if it is just about to accomplish something even though it’s largely futile. I’m not going to try and trace the precise fractals of my father’s emotions, but I’m not sure that he was really angry at the Luxembourgers who apparently thrived around him, and I’m not even sure that he was really angry. He had reason to feel guilty because, by insisting on farming when he was unable to do the work, he put his son in a desperate situation. Dad also had reason to be scared, not of his neighbors but of the destruction that his accident set in motion and that surgery after surgery couldn’t defuse.
When my father was convalescing from hip surgery, our family would gather around my parents’ bed and watch happy staccato shows filled with double takes and signature lines. On Laugh-In, a bikinied, graffitied Goldie Hawn gyrated to rock music, then stopped to say, “Sock it to me!” On Get Smart, Don Adams, an adenoidal parody of an international spy, emerged from rubble and smoke and announced, “Missed it by that much.”
Dad wore his purple robe over his underwear. His shins and the incision on his hip were purple, as if he had been permanently bruised. He had an ease with his body that only the extremely fit or the extremely sick are allowed. For whatever small consolation they gave him, he loved salves, unguents, and lotions. He greased his chest and throat with Vicks VapoRub. He would spoon it into a frying pan filled with water, then boil the water and inhale the vapors. It would float in slippery reconfiguring islands in the simmering water. He encouraged us to eat a spoonful now and then.* If I remember correctly (no recordings of his voice survive), he talked like a salesman, with a voice as bright as a merry-go-round.
He cajoled us into rubbing cocoa butter on his feet. The cocoa butter smelled like chocolate but reminded me of hospitals. Maybe because we were farm kids—and had seen, say, a veterinarian thrust his arm into a cow’s vagina—we were not bothered by my father’s feet: his bunion-contoured toes, his amber nails, the inflamed skin that ringed the calluses. We held plaid-encased heating pads to his back, filled rubber hot water bottles, scratched his back or handed him his back scratcher, a plastic hand on a stick. These attentions reminded me of Christ on Holy Thursday, the shock as the priest removed his shoes.
One afternoon, Colleen and I watched TV with Dad on the bed. The recovery from his surgery—his seventh? his ninth?—was not going well. Dad told us something that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, something that both then and now seems understandable: One day you will find me hanging from one of the trees in the pasture. I am amazed how parenthetical my father’s despair was. Despite his despairing talk, he never surrendered to it. The dominant chord of my childhood was this: All of us were trying as hard as we could. It just wasn’t enough.