My old man was always fussy about the process of shitting. I can't remember my toilet training, but I'm sure the psychologists would feast on the details. He did have several hard and fast rules about toilet paper usage which I've also managed to forget. When he was near the end, dying of cancer, the hospice people put one of those white plastic potties alongside his hospital bed so he wouldn't have to make the journey across the hall to the bathroom every time he had to relieve himself or move his bowels. We had a procedure. He would indicate to me he wanted to use the potty. I would go to the side of the bed, extend my index fingers to him, then, after he took one in each hand, pull him up to a sitting position as he swung his legs off the side of the bed. I'd help him over to the potty, then leave him to it. We'd done it many times during the four months I'd been there and it had become a smooth operation.
But one day, after he had moved his bowels he asked me to wipe his ass. This was something new. He had never asked this of me before so I was understandably taken aback, yet feeling charitable at that particular moment, I figured what the hell and decided to give it the old college try. Unfortunately, I had never wiped anyone's ass before so I had no idea where to start or in which direction to go. It wasn't as if somewhere along the line I had taken a tutorial on how to properly wipe someone else's ass. My indecision and hesitation pissed him off – he'd never been a patient man – and he rather viciously tore the toilet paper out of my hand and completed the process himself. As I took his offering across the hall and flushed it down the toilet, I couldn't help laughing. Here he was, near death, still being the same nasty and abusive shit he'd always been.
“Wipe your own ass, you old fuck,” I thought but didn't say. There wouldn't have been any sense in that – he didn't have much time left anyway.
Funny thing about my situation was that I had spent my whole childhood avoiding him and my entire adulthood escaping him. You might think that Casper, Wyoming was far enough away from Long Island to give me the peace I craved, the peace I deserved, but turned out it wasn't. Sure, he couldn't drop by in his car, though he did do that once with horrific results, yet, as much as I wanted to be free of him, he couldn't bring himself to fucking leave me alone. He insisted on calling me every Saturday like clockwork. I dreaded the ringing of the phone and I dreaded the sound of his voice. It always struck me like a gut punch. But I always spoke to him because I knew my mother wanted me to. Even so, our conversations consisted of meaningless chatter. I didn't want to know what he was up to and, not wanting to prolong the call, I wasn't about to tell him what was going on in my life. Still, the calls kept coming.
A few months back, my aunts – my mother's sisters – started calling to tell me my mother needed help taking care of the old man and that my brother, Roger, who I liked to refer to as “Roger the Lodger” since he was 40 and still living home, wouldn't pitch in at all. Ironically, when the old man did expire and people praised me for having cared for him those final months, Roger, clad in his red MAGA cap, told anyone willing to listen that he would've helped if I hadn't come home and taken over. I even heard my mother defend him to somebody one day with the same line of shit but by that time all I cared about was getting home to my wife and our favorite stretch of fly fishing water so I let it slide.
The church service was unremarkable but when we got to the cemetery things turned into a real shit show when Roger's girlfriend, Rhonda, threw herself on the casket. I don't know if it was spontaneous or if Roger had convinced her to do it. It wouldn't have been hard since she was simpler than a two piece jigsaw puzzle. Ironically, despite her huge sense of loss, the old man had disliked her and always referred to her as “the idiot.”
If, in the telling, I have sounded a wee bit irreverent that's not accidental. The old man was a brutal, abusive bastard. He liked to kick my mother and shove her through the cellar door and lock it. I can still here her pleading softly so the other people in the duplex wouldn't hear, “Tony, please, please let me out. Let me out, Tony, please.” Eventually, it would fall on me to let her out. If he was still in the kitchen, she'd scamper away until it was safe.
As you might suspect, he kicked the shit out of me, too, whenever he got the chance, hence the eternal resentment.
One day when I was sixteen I had finally had enough. He was chasing my mother around the dining room table, gritting his teeth, snarling, his face dripping sweat, when I stepped in between them, raised my fists and told him to cut the fuckin' shit. For weeks afterward, my mother told me I had hurt his feelings and urged me to apologize. That never happened and, frankly, I was disappointed that she wanted me to.
Anyway, I never wanted anything to do with him which is why I moved to Wyoming and, now that he was safely in the ground, wasn't going to waste any time getting my ass back to Casper.
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