In Memoriam

A note from the author: This essay is not sexual in nature. Merely personal, and maybe funny. I hope you'll read it anyway, however.

***

My dad died last Friday.

It was one of those passings that was both sudden and not. I wrote last year of finally convincing him to move from Virginia, closer to his children up north. After he got here, my dad seemed to spend more time in the hospital than out. He would fall, or develop issues from his blood condition. In his assisted living facility he’d tumble and require an emergency room visit, which would lead to him being admitted. He’d faint, or become dizzy and non responsive, or exhibit signs of another stroke. Last week he’d been admitted to the hospital after one of his breakfast fainting spells; he was fine and happily grilling the nurses on their knowledge of American history for several days—and then last Thursday he crashed and I got a call to get out there while I could.

It’s been a long time coming and something I’ve prepared for, for a year and a half. Simultaneously, those final few hours felt swift and shocking.

He had checked out long ago, though. We used to enjoy crackling banter—as I’ve recorded in these pages several times. This last year, the only topics of conversation to which he’d really warm up would be about his living center’s resident cat, and the meals served in their dining room. So I’d call, or more often visit, and hear what had been on the menu for every meal that week, and listen to his complaints about dining room baked goods, and then a rant identical to the last time I’d visited about how he’d like pancakes for breakfast sometime but they always bring him an omelette, and then I’d say well why don’t you tell them you’d like pancakes instead of an omelette and he says well I would complain but their omelette is always so good that I don’t mind eating it. Then, having exhausted everything he enjoyed talking about, we’d discuss the upcoming week’s menus, and by that time it would be lunch and he’d have to go.

He liked his new residence and had started making some friends, but it was plain that his heart wasn’t into it. His life had been so severely diminished.

***

His funeral is next week. Rather than focus any more on his death, allow me to share one story from his life—one I haven’t told before in its entirety, because it still creeps me out.

***

In the autumn of 2020, I had to live with my dad for six weeks. We were six months into the pandemic. I think as a nation we’d stopped disinfecting our groceries at that point, but restaurants were still only open for takeout. Masks were required everywhere. Schools were operating remotely, only. And my dad had prostate cancer.

He’d hidden the diagnosis for a good seven or eight months until his doctors told him his particular case was particularly aggressive. They ordered him to undergo radiation therapy five days a week for six weeks.

My father had extremely low vision. His eyesight was absolutely uncorrectable, even with the thickest lenses. He always lived in a world of blurs without edges and smears of color. He couldn’t really see faces or people’s expressions. He couldn’t read signs, even large ones. He wasn’t blind, but he could only really see clearly what he could hold an inch away from his eyes. Things like books, or an iPad, and for the former he’d still need a magnifying glass.

Because of his eyesight he couldn’t drive. During the pandemic he didn’t want to be climbing into stranger’s Ubers ten times a week to get back and forth from the cancer center.

Once I got over my irritation that he'd hidden his condition for so long, I was anxious to help.

My dad expected me to drive 375 miles both ways twice a week, heading home on the weekends, but I am not that fond of road travel. If I was going to be there for him, I was going to stay the whole time. I’d cook, I’d clean, I’d chauffeur. I packed up a bunch of clothing, my Playstation and electronics, tossed my Instant Pot in my car's back seat, and temporarily moved into my childhood house.

Away from home and loved ones, I was miserable. My quarters were uncomfortable. My dad was a hoarder, so the only place I could escape—from his stacks of magazines dating back to the early 1970s, the toppling piles of return address labels and years’ worth of canned cat food and bags of Halloween candy (some distant Halloween in the 1990s), the coffee cups jammed packed with toenail files and dried-out felt tips, the mail he never threw out and the largest collection of ketchup packets on the North American continent—was the postage-stamp sized bedroom I’d been allotted.

We got into a routine. We’d wake early and head to the cancer center. I’d drop him at the front door. Since I wasn’t allowed inside because of their Covid protocols, I’d sit in the parking lot and read until he was done with his radiation. We’d go home, we’d eat lunch. Then I’d shut myself up in the bedroom and only emerge to do some daily exercise and make a delicious dinner at which he’d turn up his nose because the name sounds funny or it has garlic?are we Italian now? or whatever happened to good solid food like Hamburger Helper? Once a week on Fridays, I’d order takeout online and bring it home. He never griped about takeout.

Everything was awful, but for the most part I bore it. Until one night at the end of the second week.

After midnight, that evening, I lay awake reading. I was finding it difficult in that place first to fall, and then to stay asleep. I was contorted in a twin bed trying to find a comfortable spot on a fifty-year-old mattress when I heard a rap on the door. “What?” I called.

My dad poked his head through the door. “Are you asleep?” he asked.

“Do you usually have conversations in your sleep?” I retorted.

“I think there’s a bird in my room.”

Now, my father at this time had the occasional memory lapse, though he refused to tell his primary physician or consult a specialist about it. I had never known him to be outright delusional, however. “A bird?”

“A bird.”

“How did a bird get into your room?”

“I don’t know. How do birds usually get into rooms?”

We weren’t getting anywhere. “Let me go look,” I sighed, heaving my aching back off the twin bed torture rack.

I already wore a t-shirt and boxer briefs. I grabbed my spectacles and put them on, because without them I was just as blind as my father. From my room we stomped across the landing to his bedroom, which ran the length of his colonial brick home. I poke my head in, expecting—what? For a pigeon to be perched on one of the curtain rods, I guess.

Nothing. There was absolutely nothing in there. “Are you sure—?” Just as I started my inquiry, however, something small and black and evil chattered and fluttered from behind a bureau to flap its foul wings in my direction. I screamed—no shame in admitting it, I screamed loud and high—grabbed my dad, and hauled him out into the hall. Once I’d slammed shut the bedroom door, I yelled at my father, “That was a bat.”

“A bat?”

“How did a bat get in your bedroom?” I demanded.

To his credit, he actually thought about the question for a little while. “The same way as the bird?”

I stomped back to my bedroom and hastily attired myself in my Bat Vanquisher costume. Apparently, I thought that consisted of an orange hoodie zipped all the way up the front with the hood string pulled so tight, I had a two-inch puckered circle as a peephole, accompanied by a pair of calf-high zip-up leather boots. Oh, and those same boxer shorts I’d been wearing earlier. For a weapon, I carried my mom’s old gut-stringed tennis racket. In this alarming and singularly ineffective ensemble, I returned to the scene of the invasion, turned the knob, and went in.

I don’t know what good I thought the hoodie was going to do. The moment the bat started flapping my way, I let out more blood-curdling screams. I am not the person anyone should turn to, when it comes to ridding the place of small mammals. Insects I’ll do. At home, though, I’ve been known to flip out when the cats find a teeny tiny mouse to play with. They won’t kill it; they’ll just bat it around to teach it a lesson or two, then transport it up to the bedroom in the middle of the night to share with me. Usually after a good fifteen minutes of shrieking bloody murder and threatening the cats with a cat orphanage, I’ll calm down, trap the mouse under a discarded salad greens container, pick it up by sliding cardboard from an Amazon box underneath, and then disposing of the horrid wriggling thing at the far end of the nearby cemetery for the neighbors there to enjoy. 

It's a process to get to that point. I have to work through my process!

But a bat? Fuck. A mouse is tiny. It can only move so fast. It moves on the ground. A bat goes everywhere. It gets in your face. It’s huge. Decades before, when a squirrel got trapped in our family's fireplace, neighbors suggested that we lay down newspaper in a path to the front door, leave the doors open, and that when we let the squirrel out, it would follow the lighter-shaded paper to the exit. None of us believed that shit and were convinced that we’d end up chasing a squirrel all over the house. But sure enough, we put down the paper, opened the fire screen, and blip blip blip, the squirrel followed the path and hippety-hopped straight out the front door.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe I could do something like that with the bat. So I had my dad go downstairs and turn on the outside porch lights. In the bedroom, certain of instant death at any moment, I opened the windows and storm windows. That was not an easy feat, as my father never, ever admitted fresh air into the house, perhaps fearing that like the treasures of an ancient Egyptian tomb exposed too quickly to an outside draft, his prehistoric collection of Virginia Quarterly Reviews and TV Guides would disintegrate to dust in mere seconds. Some of those panes hadn’t been shifted since the sixties.

Then I turned out the lights and tiptoed out of the room.

“We are going to wait for half an hour,” I said. “You may sit on the sofa downstairs. The bat should fly out the window. We’ll check back and see if it’s gone.”

He didn’t have any other options, so I sat in my bedroom with teeth chattering as I cursed my luck. A half hour passed. We reconvened outside the door. I went in again and turned on the lights.

The bat immediately began screeching my way. I screamed and ran out again.

“So was it gone?” my dad asked.

“WHAT DO YOU FUCKING THINK?” I gently replied.

“What are we going to do?”

I knew exactly what we were going to do. “We are going to collect our valuables,” I gravely announced, “And then I am going to get the lawn mower gasoline can from the basement and we are going to burn this house down, walk away, and never look back.”

“I think you’re being a little extreme.”

“I did not sign up for this!” I shrieked. My watch read well past one a.m. I was tired and I hated rodents. Particularly rodents with wings. I hated being there. I hated being the only one who could actually do anything. “I did not sign up for bats. If I had known bats were going to be involved, I would not have agreed to stay in this hellhole for six weeks with you and the bats.”

Unperturbed by my outbreak, my dad repeated, “So what are we going to do?”

I sigh. “Just wait.” Back to my bedroom in my Bat Vanquisher costume I stomped. I pulled out my phone and opened Twitter to query my timeline. Anyone have any speedy hints for getting rid of a bat in my dad’s bedroom?

Apparently I had more followers up after midnight than I anticipated, because I started getting suggestions right away. None of them were great, mind you. My friend Sam sent me a DM. It’s easy. Just bop it!

Bop it?

Yeah. Just bop it!

My thumbs stabbed out, I am going to need a little more information than ‘just bop it.’

Okay you go slow, get ready, then you creep up and…just bop it!

He made the bopping sound so easy. I could creep. I had a tennis racket. I could get a trashcan. Maybe I could handle this bop it thing after all. “Stay out here,” I told my dad as I tugged tight my hood string. “I’m going to bop it.”

Inside the bedroom, I immediately spied the bat hanging upside down from the ceiling molding in the far corner. Go slow, I told myself, following Sam’s directions. My boots made a squeaking noise across my dad’s wood floors that I immediately regretted, in case the bat mistook it for his long-lost mate. But slow I was ordered to go, so I went slow.

Get ready. I brandished my mom’s racket in my right hand. My long fingers clutched the bottom of a metal wastebasket that my dad had owned since he was a kid. It was painted in Revolutionary War soldiers, all of whom were armed and ready to assist. Past my mom’s old bed I shuffled. Past the dresser. Past the foot of my father’s bed. The bat was still motionless. Glaring at me, probably. Yes, yes, I knew that blind as a bat was a commonplace for a reason, but I wouldn’t have put glaring past this particular bat.

I was going to bop it, though. I was going to take that racket, hold up the trash can, then I was going to bop it. Bop it down into the metal bin, then cover the opening with the racket head and throw it out the window. And by it, I meant basket, racket, and bat. All I had to do was bop it. Bop it good.

The bat stayed motionless as I drew near. With one shaky arm I held up the can. I raised my racket, ready to bop. I was going to give just the littlest of bops, and…

The damned vermin lunged for me. I felt its grabby little claws on my hoodie, scrabbling at the fabric. I started screaming again despite the open windows, tried to bat it away from my head, thought better about touching a fucking bat, then just dropped to the floor and yelled a lot more. When the bat retreated, flapping ostentatiously, I ran outside again and slammed the door.

“Did you get it?” asked my dad.

“Well.” I drew myself up with as much dignity as someone wearing my particular Bat Vanquisher gear can muster. “It’s been nice knowing you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home. North. Away from here. Good luck with your cancer thing.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll clear up,” he said, playing along.

“Stay put a minute,” I growled.

I went to my bedroom and shut the door. I didn’t cry, though I felt like it. I checked Twitter, where more suggestions were trickling in. Most of them were variations on Just bop it, so I shut down Twitter. I called home and unloaded my frustrations on my poor confused mate, who understood not a word of my rant and plaintively yawned, “How did a bat get in the bedroom?”

“OH I DON’T KNOW,” I thundered. “THE SAME WAY AS THE BIRD?”

But look. As much as I was freaked out by the task at hand, it was clear that close to two in the morning, I was going to have to conquer my fears and get the job done. The only alternate plan I could think of was to ask my dad to sleep in the living room overnight, then by daylight hire a professional to come care of the problem. I knew there were no guarantees to finding a bat control person that easily, though. Plus that would break our pandemic isolation, and I didn’t want to expose my dad to Covid.

It was up to me. This time I wasn’t tentative. I left the bedroom and was about to announce to my dad my plan. I was going to bop that bat good.

Only my dad wasn’t in the hall.

I called his name down the stairs.

He wasn’t downstairs.

I opened the bedroom door. “You coming in?” I heard my dad say. “Don’t let the bat out.”

I slipped inside and leaned against the wall. “I told you to stay outside.”

My dad was standing motionless at the foot of my mom’s bed. From somewhere he’d pulled out a plastic whiffle bat that had been mine when I was six. He’d assumed a classic batter stance. “I thought I’d go bat hunting.”

“You can’t see shit,” I pointed out.

“That just means the bat can’t see me,” he said with good cheer.

I was about to remind him that it doesn’t work that way when I remembered we could be attacked at any moment. “Where’d the bat go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see shit.”

I still don’t see the bat. “Did you hit it?”

“All I did was walk in and look around, and then you came in. I didn’t swing at anything.”

I didn’t get it. Did my dad scare the bat out the window? Did it just leave? I shuffled toward him and around the bed…and then I saw where the bat had gotten to.

“Don’t move,” I ordered.

Because beneath the foot of his left bedroom slipper was a slightly squished dead bat. I lowered my tennis racket for the first time that night and informed him of the fact. “Well, gawrsh,” he said in that tone of mild perpetual astonishment that I’ll forever associate with his delivery. “How the heck did that happen?”

And that, good folk, is how I prefer to remember my father. When I knew him at his best, he didn’t lose his cool while others ran around like a gay, screeching Chicken Little. In an emergency, he used to be the last person to lament and moan. And even in victory, he never gloated or aggrandized his achievements.

He couldn’t see the bat, that night. He didn’t know how to bop a bat any more than I did. But in a pinch, my dad got shit done. And I loved him for it.

(I did include an explicit no fucking bats clause in my agreements for overnight visits afterward, though.)

***

If you'd like to help support or thank me for years of candid sex blogging, the best thing you could do is purchase some of my published erotic fiction.

Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men is a vintage-style collection of hot, retro college-themed X-rated fiction penned by some pretty great authors of man on man erotica. My contribution, Sleazy A, is based on some of my own college sexcapades.

The publishing house for this project can be found at Peterschutes.com . There are already multiple vintage-style pulps on sale over there, with more to come. If you sign up for their newsletter, you’ll be eligible to receive a free eBook.

Order your copy of Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men from Amazon