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Paper Bags

“Put this on,” he said as he handed me a surgical mask with a smirk on his face. Not the kind of smirk because something is funny, but the kind of smirk because you are trying to hide every single emotion that is in you. “You’re going to need it.” And, not the kind of surgical mask that has four ribbons that you tie around your head, but the kind that cups over your nose and mouth with an elastic band that tucks behind your neck. People wear these masks because they are afraid they’re going to catch something like bird flu, or swine flu. Or worse. I hated him in that moment. I will always hate him. And, not for the smirk, but for what he said next: “This will all be yours soon.”

He had already been there. I had not.

~~~

“Hey, moonpie, this is your father. I know that we haven’t talked in awhile, and I know that I’ve done a lot.” He pauses. “Or haven’t done a lot. I love you,” he says my name. I start crying. “Maybe you can come up here, or I can come there, and we could help each other. I know your brother won’t want to see me. But, maybe he will. You could talk to him.” He pauses again. “I don’t know,” he says my name again. I am bawling. “I don’t have a lot. I have nothing. I don’t have you. Maybe you could call me. I love you. I miss you.”

I click to the next message. It is a bill collector.

I erase them both.

~~~

“If you care about your shoes and the bottoms of your pants, I’d get these on, too.” Apparently, the next step in the process was to affix plastic shopping bags around the bottoms of our legs with rubber bands the best we could. I tried watching to see how everyone else was doing it.

My brother said, “Fuck this shit. I don’t need this shit.” And, he went inside. No mask, no bags on his feet.

My grandmother uttered a faint “tsk” under her breath in opposition of his word choice.

Other than those two things, no one said a single word. You could hear the crinkling of the plastic every time a foot touched the ground.

I couldn’t go in yet. I was staring at this place. This house—yeah, I guess you’d call it a house—on this huge plot of land in some dilapidated town six hours away from my home. I had never been there. He had lived there all this time and not once had I been in his home, this place. When did it turn into this place? When did that happen? No one had prepared me for what was inside this place because no one knew how to talk about it. We all knew this man at some point in his life. And, yes, I needed to think of him as “this man,” and I needed to think of his home as “this place.” It was the only way I knew how. Lots of people talk about having surreal moments in their lifetimes. I’m not sure if there are such things. What I do know is that there are particular moments in people’s lives, and if they don’t look at those moments as being somehow disjointed from reality, they can’t get through them. Sometimes, you have to make a moment not real when it is probably the most real thing you will ever experience.

This is that moment.

I stepped through the screen door.

~~~

“There is money in paper bags,” he says. “There is money in those bags. You just have to look. It can help with everything, and for you guys.” He looks out the window. “There is money in paper bags.”

~~~

There was no place to walk. I mean, there was no place for any rational human being to want to walk there. There seemed to be a sort of path, but not really. I guess, you don’t need a path to the door if you haven’t left your house in years. Although, I’m sure he had to have left at some point for some things. He had to have. He had to. But, I looked around and I knew that he had not. I looked around, but what I saw was not registering in my mind. It was like a painting. The most mind-altering, life-changing painting that I’ve ever seen.

There was no place to walk. I knew he had three animals. We didn’t have animals growing up, nor had I ever had a pet, but I knew this man had two dogs and one cat because at the hospital he talked about them like they were his life. He knew where we were. He was dying. He had had a stroke, but he was still coherent. He was not the man I knew. He was like a baby. He was not big and strong. He was a baby. And, he knew we were there.

There was no place to walk. As my plastic bag-covered foot first tried to walk on top of the hard balls of shit that lay everywhere, I could not take another step. I was frozen trying to think about how it all started. What happened on that first day when one of his dogs, or his cat, first took a shit on the floor that he said to himself, “I’m not cleaning that up.” And, how about the second time? What happened that day? The third? The tenth? The twenty-seventh day? The fucking fifty-eighth day? What happened that day? The hundredth? What the fuck happened on the hundred and twelfth day that one of his fucking pets decided to shit on the floor because neither he nor they had left the house – what happened that he said he was going to let it just get worse? Because even on the two-hundred and sixty-third time, you could still walk. You could still have walked in here the three-hundredth time, even. You could still have walked. You could still have cleaned this up. You could still have done that. I don’t know how it got to the point where you just couldn’t walk.

I took another step.

~~~

“When I get out of here, you guys, we’ll all go to Florida. Or, wherever you want. We could go anywhere you want. But, we’ll spend time together. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

Sometimes, you have to make a moment not real when it is probably the most real thing you will ever experience.

~~~

There were flies everywhere. Not one, or two. Not ten, or twenty. They were everywhere. I kept telling myself the flies came after he went to the hospital. After the doors were opened. I kept telling myself that.

There were flies everywhere. But, they had only arrived recently. The flies had not lived here with him, and his two dogs, and his cat. The flies were only a recent addition to this place. They’d only just arrived.

There were flies everywhere.

~~~

He wants to have a cigarette. “Are you kidding me? He can’t smoke. Why are they letting him smoke?”

His mother tells me that the cancer wasn’t caused from his smoking. The cancer is already in his brain. There is nothing cigarettes are going to do to him now. She says that the doctors told her that if he wants to smoke to let him. He’s dying.

So, we go to an odd area in an even odder hospital. The whole lot of us: him in a wheelchair, his brother, my brothers, me. Others stay in the room to talk. We are leaving soon to go to his house.

I smoke a cigarette with him. He has never seen me smoke. He doesn’t even know that I smoke. There was a time in my life I would throw away his cigarette packs when I would find them. When I was young.

We dump our ashes into tin cans placed on concrete ledges.

~~~

I needed a cigarette. But, this was a mission. We were supposed to be looking through paper bags. We were supposed to be trying to see if we wanted anything. Like a souvenir, perhaps.

I needed a cigarette. I could not think of my immediate surroundings. I could not think of all the boxes full of I-am-not-even-sure-what piled one on top of the other—if you can even call it a pile—until it reached the ceiling. This was the most organized area. It was the living room. It was not organized. Nothing there was organized. It was piles. Piles upon piles of piles and more piles on top of piles and piles and piles and more piles on top of piles in boxes and all of it on top of this floor that wasn’t a floor because it was covered in shit.

I needed a cigarette. I passed by things on my right and on my left and there was no space between me and these things. I could not think coherently about what surrounded me. My body was encased in garbage. My mind felt the same way, so I thought of other things than the things I could see before me. I tried sending my mind somewhere else, somewhere faraway. But, before it could get there, I thought I heard my name being called. My grandmother was by the stairwell and she was calling my name. It seemed so far away, but she was only across the hall. She was in another world. Another world I could not walk to yet. How was I going to get to where she was? How was I going to make my way over more shit on the floor that I could not look at but I felt it, I felt it under my shoes under these bags that made noises every time I stepped on hard balls of shit and I thought of my grandmother who had already walked on these same balls of shit and I thought of this man, this man who was dying who must have walked on top of these balls of shit every day without any bags or mask, and I took another step.

~~~

“Moonpie, this is your father.”

“Hey, what’s up?” I ask as though we talk all the time. As though hearing from him does not absolutely does not ignite a pit of emotion in my gut so large that I want to cry and punch things and scream. “How are ya?”

“Just wanted to hear my little girl’s voice. I wasn’t sure if you would pick-up the phone.”

“Of course, I’d pick up the phone.” A single tear emerges from my eye, an uncontrollable reflex. I know he is sick. That is all I really know. I know it’s bad. I don’t know how long. I haven’t seen him in years.

“It’s good to hear your voice. What are you doing with yourself? Are you working? I want to get to know you.”

“Yeah,” I lie. I tell him all about the job I have and how much I love it—when, in fact, I hate it—so that a man who hasn’t wanted much to do with me can be proud of me. I try to sound happy. I try to make it sound like he didn’t fuck me up. I do this because I know his own parents fucked him up. Despite my emotions, I don’t blame him. I love him.

He cries when he talks to me. I can tell he is crying. It makes the second tear stop from falling from my own eyes. Somehow, I have to be strong for him so that he knows I am okay. I want him to think I am strong, even though I am not. And, I don’t even know why I am doing this.

I tell him I love him.

I think I told him I loved him.

~~~

“This is where he called you from,” my grandmother told me. “This is where they found him. He called you when he was having his stroke.” I told her that he didn’t sound like he was in any physical pain. I did not tell her that he did sound like he was in intense emotional pain. He called me while having a stroke, and I had no idea. I was whom he chose to call in that moment. All I know is that his emotions hurt him more than any physical pain could have because I had no idea he was lying there, there on the stairwell, having a stroke during that conversation. I had no idea. He called me from this stairwell surrounded by little balls of shit beneath him, surrounded by flies that weren’t there then, and surrounded by garbage and piles and piles and piles and piles and piles and piles… And, I had no idea.

“This is where he called you from.”

~~~

“He’s sick. The cancer traveled to his brain and we’re not sure when that happened. It caused him to be different.” We are walking to the car. “He knew he was dying and that was what he wanted. He stocked up on food. There is so much food there.”

~~~

Bags. There were lots and lots of paper bags in the kitchen. Bags from fast food places, from when he still left the house. They were piled on top of one another. Piles of paper bags covered the kitchen table and its surrounding chairs and formed some sort of mountain where the table and chairs were barely discernible. On top of Old Smokey, all covered with snow…

Bags. We were supposed to be looking through these bags, but all I was looking at were the cabinets. This man had so many cabinets. All the cabinets were hung open. Inside all these cabinets were canned goods and boxed food and it all seemed to be spilling out of the cabinets. There were boxes on the counters all filled with more food. There was more food in that room than I have ever seen in my life. And, it was all surrounded by garbage. Garbage, and shit on the floor, and the flies that weren’t there until a couple of days ago. And, where did he make this food? How did he eat this food?

Bags. This man’s brother was looking through all these bags. There probably were big wads of hundreds in a few of these bags. I had no desire to find them. There could’ve been more than that. This man used to do very well for himself. Something had to buy all that food. Something had to buy 19 acres of land for him to hole himself away in what, at one point, was considered a home. But, I never knew that home. I just knew this place filled with garbage and shit and bags and food and flies that weren’t there.

Bags. I was supposed to be looking through bags. I looked through one. There were some unused napkins inside.

~~~

“I’ve been in town for a few days on a job and I haven’t been able to wash up. I’ve been sleeping in my truck and I was wondering if I can come by and take a shower.” I am angry. I am getting ready for work. I haven’t seen him in a few years. I don’t understand why he couldn’t get a room somewhere if he was going to be in town. Why is he sleeping in his truck? How hard is it to get a cheap motel? It’s not hard. I want things to be different so badly that I am angry.

“My place is a mess,” I tell him. It really is a mess. This is a big part of why I say no to him. I don’t want my father, who I haven’t seen in ages, to see what a mess my apartment is. I haven’t cleaned the bathroom in, like, a month. I have clothes all over my bedroom floor. There are a few dirty dishes in the sink. I definitely need to sweep. I have no time to do this before I have to be at work. I am so mad. How can he call me, when I haven’t seen him in years, to ask if he could come over to take a shower because he has no place to go? How can he do this? Why can’t he call and take me out for coffee if he wants to be my father again? Why is he calling to ask to take a fucking shower?

“I don’t care about that,” he says. “I can help you clean, if you want.”

I tell him no.

~~~

I did not go in the bathroom. I did not go up the stairs and turn my head left. I did not take a few more steps and I did not go in there. I did not see the bathroom. I did not see the bathroom and it did not make me turn immediately around and head back down the stairs and it did not make me leave the house and it did not explain all the flies even further because I never saw the bathroom.

I did not go in the bathroom.

~~~

At the hospital, he stares at me with big eyes. They are like a child’s eyes. These eyes are taking in wonder that fills his soul with awe. He is taking me in. He is taking me in and I should be feeling something else in this moment. Something like love. But, I don’t know what that is anymore.

~~~

I am smoking a cigarette with my brother in silence. Everyone else is still inside.

Somewhere in this place, this man has money in paper bags. I wish I had the strength to find at least one of those bags.

Not for the money.

“You should have worn the bags, maybe,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says.