The Complete Collection. William Wharton
way across Missouri. Late afternoon, we reach St Louis. We manage to get ourselves lost in a complex series of overpasses, underpasses and cross-over exits.
We’re going round and round as if we’re on a roller coaster and getting nowhere. Looming over all is the most godawful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s some kind of steel rainbow. It curves up in the air hundreds of feet, but doesn’t go anywhere. It looks as if the people in St Louis decided to build their own Washington Monument and got confused; or the damned thing melted in the heat so it bent over and the top stuck into the ground. The Disney approach has totally invaded American thinking.
After we go through the loop-the-loops at least six times, we give up. We cruise off our roller coaster in the shadow of that towering steel rainbow and into one of the most desolate black ghettos I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing but boarded-up brick buildings, cracked streets and thousands of people hanging loose on corners. Here’s this monstrosity looming over them, costing millions of dollars, and these people live in filth.
We stop at a gas station and ask how we get on the main route east. After half an hour twisting through St Louis, we’re on the open road again. America is clots of people, joined by gigantic straight highways. Most of this country is practically empty.
We start looking for a motel when we’re fifty miles into Illinois on the other side of St Louis. We stop at twenty different places but they’re all filled. We move on another thirty miles, going off at each little dink of a town, drifting up and down tiny streets in our Batmobile, looking for lit motel signs.
Finally, we pull over on the roadside at a picnic place to camp out. I have Tom’s tent and a blanket. It’s so hot we won’t need the blanket; this air’s stiff with humidity.
I’d half hoped we’d leave humidity in Missouri but it goes all the way to the Atlantic. I don’t know how people stand it. Sure I do. They run from air-conditioned houses to air-conditioned cars, drive to air-conditioned movies, shopping malls, restaurants. They move between air-conditioning machines like people living on the moon or a hostile planet where the air’s unfit for humans. It just about is.
It’s dark when we unpack the tent. It’s tangled and still has dirt from Topanga Canyon wrapped in it, our own forty acres here in Illinois. There are some tough knots to untangle. I just pulled up and rolled it when I packed. Dad isn’t saying anything, only struggling in the dark with the knots.
We aren’t there five minutes when the mosquitoes hit. They must come out of the grass. At first it’s only a few, along with some lightning bugs, but then there are swarms.
I wrap myself in the blanket to fend them off. Dad slaps once in a while, but keeps at those knots.
The tent is a simple pup tent with a floor. We’ll be crowded but it’s better than sleeping in the car or driving through the night.
At last we struggle ourselves inside the tent with the mosquito netting pulled across. We beat down twenty or so of the beasts we’ve closed in with us. I hear thousands outside trying to chew their way through. I’m slippery with blood from the ones I’ve squashed, my blood.
We stretch out side by side. I never realized what a thick, broadshouldered old dog Dad is. I’ve slept in pup tents with other guys and there was plenty of room. I peek to see if he’s got extra room but he’s pushing against his side, too.
And now we begin hearing the trucks. I’m sure they’ve been going by all the time but we didn’t notice. One passes about every two minutes; there’s hardly any time between. One roars off east and we start hearing another, west. Just our luck, we’re on a slight grade. All the eastbound trucks are shifting down to make the hill while the westbounds are double shifting up a gear.
We lie out like that for an hour, neither of us saying anything, hoping the other guy is asleep but knowing he isn’t.
Then the wind starts. It quickly blows up into a real Mid-west thunder-and-lightning storm. We didn’t exactly do a merit-badge job putting up our tent, either. What with knots, dark and mosquitoes, it’s sagging in every direction, mostly front to back, like a sway-back horse.
Bam! Crash! Flash! Thumble! Rumble! Crack! Flash! The lightning and thunder are almost simultaneous. It goes on and on. At least now we can’t hear the trucks. And some rain! Some wind! The tent slowly begins collapsing against us. Anyplace we touch, the rain leaks through. What do mosquitoes do in a rainstorm? Drown? Swim? Dig holes? They can’t fly, that’s for sure.
We begin edging toward each other. Then we roll up on our sides and tuck spoon-style away from the tent. The whole wild world is doing its damnedest out there. Dad reaches over my shoulder.
‘Here, take this, Bill. Otherwise, we’ll never sleep.’
In a flash of lightning I see it’s a ‘reddy’, Seconal. Where in hell did my father get a thing like that? And what’s he doing carrying it in his shirt pocket?
I have a hard time swallowing any pill even with water. But I slug it down with some apple juice in a bottle at the head of the tent. Dad pops his like a true pill freak.
Imagine, him popping reds; shows what you don’t know.
I’m up early. When I telephone the hospital, they say Dad’s condition is critical but stable.
I take my notes from Max and sit down at the typewriter again. I type out a formal request for all the neurological examinations he said should have been done. They include an LP, or spinal tap, a brain scan, an EEG – electroencephalogram – certain blood tests and psychiatric consultation. I make a clean copy of this letter and mail it registered to Dr Chad at Perpetual. The original I put on my clipboard along with the statement of Dad’s case and the Knight & Knight signed card.
At the post office I make photocopies of all these for record. After that, I go back home and type out a recapitulation of last evening’s events at the convalescent home. Mother is curious about what I’m doing. I put her off as best I can; I’m barely holding myself together.
I go to the hospital. I stop at intensive care to see Dad but he’s still wired, taped up and unconscious. God, he looks so pitiful! It gives me strength to go through with all this.
I ask the nurse at the desk for the administrative offices. They’re on the top floor of the building; I take the elevator up. I find the office of the administrative director and tell the secretary I’d like to see Dr Benson. She gives me a look as if I’d asked to see God.
‘Dr Benson is very busy, sir. Dr Benson is preparing for a conference in Boston. Who are you and what is it you want?’
I go for broke; give her a quick summary of the situation. She listens with her pasted-on smile but doesn’t interrupt.
She sees me for what I am, crank. I’m getting nowhere. I pull the Knight & Knight card off the clipboard.
‘Give this to Dr Benson, please. Tell him my attorneys have suggested I present this card before action is taken. I’ll be downstairs in the intensive care unit with my father; the name is Dr Tremont.’
I don’t stay while she’s reading the card; it’ll work or it won’t. I walk out. This part of the building doesn’t smell like a hospital. It has the ordinary office smell of typewriter ribbons, erasers, used perfume, starch, paper and the electronic smell of computers. I take the elevator down to Dad in the nether regions.
I sit in the room with him. I check to see if the IV, catheter, monitors, oxygen are all in place. I tuck in his bedclothes; all meaningless moves, just puttering around, trying to hold myself in. A few nurses look at me but I’m so deep into grief and anger they turn away. I’m half expecting a security guard. If he does come, he’ll need a submachine gun to get me out. I stare at Dad; he seems miles away, in another world.
The water’s hot. I pour some in the