PEPPER

Jackie is at the sink doing dishes.

I'm fully naked on my new wheelchair (recently borrowed from the local ALS chapter) - a red throw pillow on my lap. The borrowed wheelchair has a joystick on it's left arm. This reactive devise allows me to race forward and backwards on the bare parquet floors without intention. I am an unfocused boy.
By holding the joystick down to a hard left, I spin elegant and mindless three hundred and sixty degrees.

Jackie is saying,

"I think I upset Pepper." Jackie is working her extreme anguish expressions.  "I told Pepper that my daughter didn't want to be alone with Eddie (Jackie's brother, Pepper's husband) because she's afraid that Eddie will get violent. See Charlie, we know this other man that has Alzheimer's, just like Eddie's, and this other man with Alzheimer's, woke up one morning - this is RECENT Charlie, this other other man woke up one morning and said, 'Who are you?' and beat his wife, Charlie! So now my daughter is afraid to be alone with my brother - because of the Alzheimer's!" And when Jackie says this last phrase, she slows it down and pitches it up, like a polished Dramatic Soprano finishing off a tragic aria.

I spin in my electric chair. I go back and forth on the banal parquet floor. Jackie entertains me. Don't get me wrong, I respect Jackie, but she can often soothe as a TV would, only this TV allows for a dialectic.

"What did she say Jackie, when you told her that?"

"Charlie" she whipers, " I don't think she liked it, because she got real quiet and said she had to get off the phone, and Pepper's not like that, Charlie. And now I feel tear- rib - bull."

I stop my puerile maneuvering and consider Jackie's situation. Jackie focuses on the dishes.

After a six count I say, " Jackie, you need to be generous, and kind, and patient, and very, very brave."

"Charlie, I am kind. I go over there. I sit in that studio apartment on Barrow they've lived in for the past forty years. I go and sometimes Pepper goes out for food. But Charlie it's scary! He jumps back and forth from the present to past. And what if he starts in on me? What if he starts lecturing for my youth. I was different forty years, Charlie, but Eddie forgets that."

"Let him say what he wants Jackie, he can't get to you. You're clearly not that person anymore."

"But why must the past always be drudged up? Why can't I get away from my past? I know I did some bad things, but why must I always be forced to look at it. What is G-d doing? What is G-d up to? I just don't know Charlie, but I can't take it."

Jackie (once again) channels Blanche Dubois. She's in pain, but her love for "Street Car" is coloring her delivery.

"Jackie, if you feel bad about Pepper, call her up. Tell her how much you love and appreciate her taking care of your brother. Tell her how lucky you are to have such a good sister in law."

Jackie takes my counsel like I'm the Dalai Lama or Doctor Phil, all wide eyed and still.
(I feel like a faker - I can dish it out but I can't take it).

_______________

Jackie and I scoot around my apartment making plans for it's new no-nonsense design. I show her pictures on the web of the the ten foot long desk I'll buy. Jackie is big on not owning a thing. She recommends I get rid of the scooter, "you have a wheel chair, do you need both?" and my homely breathing machine, "do you ever use that thing? Get rid of it, you don't need it."

But in the midst of our happy planning, Jackie stops short.

"I gotta go Charlie, I gotta call Pepper."

12th avenue

12th avenue
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

empire

empire
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

summer

summer
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

ny

ny
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

pier

pier
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

van

van
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

PROVENANCE

PROVENANCE
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

TUMBLING ACT

I spend the first part of the last Saturday in June in contained, drowsy, air conditioning.

Jackie comes over to do dishes, rhapsodizing about the movie actor and fifties heartthrob, Tab Hunter.  She has his autobiography from the New York Public Library in hand.

"Charlie! Look at these pictures! Such beautiful pictures! I've never seen such beautiful pictures."

She finds me in my bedroom, on my rolling office chair, doing... nothing.

Whenever Jackie comes over, I am pleasantly bowled over. Today, she's crazy about Tab Hunter - as moony as she was fifty years ago. And her passion is contagious. I can't help but get excited about Tab Hunter too.

She opens the cellophaned book to the middle section where there are many pages of  black and white Hollywood snapshots of Tab Hunter with various starlets.

"Find my glasses Jackie! I can't really see the pictures!"

"Your glasses, your glasses - are they in the bathroom? Are they in the kitchen?" She's urgent. This is important.

(This is why Jackie likes me- why others in the past have liked me. I'm often suggestible to other's hobbies, passions, fetishes. Unless I immediately shun their influence, I'm taken in. So today I spend an hour in bed, my legs in the air creating a 45 degree angle to the headboard, researching Tab Hunter, ogling shots of Tab and Natatlie, Tab and Anthony.

_____________

Earlier in the day, before breakfast, before coffee, (but after dreaming of being lost in a beach community hungover- I spent the entire dream trying to get home but I couldn't think because I was too hungover), after that - I fell off the toilet. Not completely off, but precarious enough to get my adrenaline going- enough to make me say to myself, to mouth the words silently, "stay calm,  just stay really calm".

__________________________

Later in the day,  I scootered to the 39th Street Flea Market. This has become a Saturday habit. I mostly peruse, but today I surprise myself and buy an "occasional table".  I know it's an occasional table because the table has a provenance.  Someone has written "occasional table, 1920s, Great Neck, NewYork, restored 1989, Glastonbury CT" in black ink on the underside. The occasional table is white wrought iron base with eight ceramic tiles on top. Some of the ceramic tiles have birds on them.

I had to have the table.   The table will reassure me that I am the kind of a person who would own a table like this.  When I get it home, I casually glance at the table, trying to imagine that I'd always owned the table. I picture people coming over and congratulating on my precious good taste. I picture them cursing themselves for not making it to the 39th Street flea market before I did.

_________________

I read David Foster Wallace's novel in the park outside my building. I feel I must, because Wallace is my exact age and David Eggers wrote that he thought it was one the best novels of the past fifty years.
But Wallace killed himself last year so I'm reluctant to read it - but I'm enjoying it - so I WILL continue to read it... and after reading for an hour, I come home and have a glass of wine.

I made dinner and as I make dinner I fall off the backless kitchen stool.

I lie on the floor and mouth the words, "just stay calm, just stay really really calm."

I call building security from a land line in the kitchen - I tug the phone to the floor - clatter.
Ten minutes later, two men in uniform quietly unlock my apartment door, find me on the kitchen floor and lift me up to standing.

One of the security men wears cologne.

I smile as they pick me up off the floor, like they're performing an amusing trick, like we're part of a tumbling act.

Thursday

Thursday
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 8)

I sit alone, unsure of what I am ordering, my face, an illustration of certitude and fear.

I listen to Susan and Mattie (in the next room) gently lift Aroo onto a pillowcase and lower him to the bottom of a topless cat carrying case.

I hear Aroo whimper.

"WAIT. What's happening? Stop!"

"No" Mattie says, "It's okay. We got him. He's okay."

Susan and Mattie bring Aroo to me like they're handing a newborn to its mother.

And when Aroo is my lap, it's just terrible. He can't lift his head. His eyes are open but register nothing.
This is not the cat I know. This is a prop, an approximation.  He looks half-dead.

"Well, he's gone" I say accusingly "I mean, he looks terrible!" - and I say this like Susan and Mattie are to blame.  (Have they been in complete denial under that bed?)

I massage Aroo under his furry chin. He's alive but clearly gone. I feel abandoned to my own health disaster.

"Aroo. Aroo!!"

The cat who lived purely for (affection and play) has been killed, by what exactly?
What is he fighting? (What am I fighting)?

Aroo is in my lap and Susan and Mattie flank me. I am the central figure in a medieval religious panel.

Aroo makes three or four little coughs. "He's still breathing" I say. But Susan adds, "I think this is it. I think he's going right now" and she says it with just a tinge of opportunity of how lucky we are that he's going NOW (and she's right).

"He's gone".

AROO, A NEW ARC (PART 7) ON A DIME

We google "how do you tell your cat is dying"; reluctance to eat or drink, distracted/disoriented, cooling bodies, rapid and shallow breathing, weakening eyesight.

We can't decide (or rather I can't) if we should bring him to a hospital tonight, or wait until morning.

I can't see him. It's all guesswork. And he might improve. It's late. I'm emotional and wiped.
"Let's let him stay under the bed." (I can't cope).

...and the scene that will play out when he's carried out of the apartment in a basket, barely alive, forced to say my last goodbye - knowing I'm sending this (life loving) cat to his death? 

No. This is too much.

"Lets let it go until tomorrow."

"I can stay over tonight " Susan says. "You shouldn't be alone. If Aroo starts to cry, I'll be here to help."

But then Susan reveals she has to be in the Bronx at eight in the morning. She would need to be up at six to shower and dress before going to work.

"No. That's no good. That's way too early, you can't do that."
I live in a yolk of exhaustion and Susan's offer seems reckless, grueling.

Susan retreats to the bedroom while I clarify the options with Mattie.

"We bring him to the vet tonight (to have him put down) or wait and see how he is in the morning. That's it. Two choices."

But then Mattie reveals that the three or four doctors she spoke to today -all said to put the cat down, as soon as possible - it would be cruel not to.

And suddenly, at eleven-thirty at night,  it's plain to me that my vacillation, my wish-washy haze, is causing Aroo additional suffering.

I turn on the proverbial dime.

"OKAY. No. Let's do it tonight. We'll do it tonight. If Aroo is feeling bad tonight, he'll feel wretched tomorrow. Go get the cat."

key chain

key chain
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts