I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. The first man I ever loved chose the bottle before me, day after day after day after day ad infinitum. I watched him die in a hospital bed. He had Sprite once we instituted the do not resuscitate order. He wanted 7up but they only had Sprite. They said he could have it now because it didn’t matter if he aspirated on the liquid. It was one of the most beautiful things to watch him drink it. He had kept asking for it, kept asking for it. It’s funny what it all comes down to.
I remember him drinking 7up all the time as a child. I remember the 1980s design of the can, the fun red circle on the green background. There was the mascot, the circle with legs and arms and sunglasses. I don’t remember if it had a name. I remember his shaving cream. Old Spice. I remember the red jar that it came in and the bone-handled brush he used to lather up his face. I remember a mug he had, a porcelain mug with a bridge where one would drink, to guard the moustache from the liquid. You don’t see those too often anymore. I found one at a thrift store not too long ago. I didn’t buy it. I regret that.
His bones showed beneath his skin and his face looked like one of the walking dead I sometimes think about when I go running with the dogs. Sister said the hospital smelled like ants when you squish them. Dead ants and babies being born and then I went to the bathroom and on the way back I stopped and picked up a New Yorker and read some of the cartoons and when I came back to the room they were taking his name down. They said he was gone. I couldn’t believe it. After all that time, after all those gasps, I missed it? For some cartoons? I don’t even like the cartoons in the New Yorker. But there were one or two breaths left in him. One or two more beats of his heart. I was there for the last moment. I don’t know what that means or why it is significant. There was an article up there on the wall about who he was and his music with a photo of him from the seventies, looking cool. But it is gone now and somebody else is dying in that room.
His ashes still sit in an urn in his girlfriend’s house in Portland. We are entitled to half. We are supposed to spread them in Ontario where the loons cry in the sunset and i remember throwing our trash on an island where black bears would wait for us, wait for the new bounty and rip the plastic to shreds. I thought that was amazing. it was horrifying. We are supposed to say goodbye to him where we used to make soap and pick blueberries but you can’t come. Because you aren’t allowed into Canada because you wrecked your car when you were drinking and driving. And you wonder why I stormed off tonight.
I don’t cry for him often. I cried for him tonight, shoulders heaving, while I wrote the part about the 7up, while my roommate was blessedly gone, thank goodness. I cried for the little girl in the blue nightgown with a rose stuck in the bosom, pretending to be Carmen from the opera by Georges Bizet. He always used to put in the tape for me in the mornings, the performance at the San Francisco Met and I would wake up to the sound of L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle, Love is a Wild Bird, the Habanera. I would pick a pink rose from the garden so I would look like Carmen. She throws the rose to her would-be lover, Jose, and in doing so seals his fate. I liked that he threw away everything for her.
So I don’t need you, but I wish you were here to hold me, and I’m so angry that you’re not. I’m so angry that nobody will ever truly be there for me really. I’m so angry that you left me daddy, I’m so angry that you couldn’t tell the things that came and stared at you at night to go away. I’m so angry that scotch was the only thing that made them fade for a while. I’m so angry that I can’t have a scotch right now and I’m so angry that I want one. I’m so angry that all the men I’ve ever loved since are just like you in that way. I’m so angry for being such a cliche. The girl with daddy issues. I’m so angry that I’m so weak, like my mother, and so proud, like both of them, and so precariously teetering on the brink of dysfunction and mania and depression but I run, run run and I smile, smile smile and bring people flowers and make them love me so maybe they won’t leave me all alone. I sat naked in the shower and let the water fall over my hair and I couldn’t tell which droplets were water and which droplets were tears and that made me feel poetic.
I have my yellow blanket that I stole from my brother’s crib. He used to threaten to take it back from me when we were older. I had become so attached to it. It was possibly the first of many of the things that I stole from my siblings, my right as the first born to take what was rightfully mine. I was there first, after all. And so there I sat, holding my dying father’s hand, while my sister was in California, too poor to afford to stay for that last moment, and my brother was in Washington, driving at breakneck speed back to Portland, where I sat in a quiet hospital room, just he and I, and he asked me to play him one more song before I left. And I did, and I left, and we made it two hours away, and then we turned around. Thank you for letting us turn around. I’m sorry I left you the way I did. You were good to me. You let me say goodbye to my father. I’ll never forget you for that, although you were just as great if not greater of a monster when it came to the whiskey. But if it weren’t for you I never would have gotten to see him drink that last Sprite. I know he knew it wasn’t a 7up, but I think he really enjoyed it anyway. And for that I am forever grateful.
