The Extravaganza/What a Day... (Excerpt 4 of 5 from "Opening the Naked Window" book II of the memoir series)

These passages are from book/season two, chapters/episodes 18: "The Extravaganza" and 19: "What a Day..."

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I was bounced right back to reality soon enough after The Extravaganza. At our post-production meeting, we were already planning a second and bigger show months later and discussed the future schedule for Lonely, but my father's surgery was upon us and he got through it like a champ. The recovery process was another story. Then my mother, who was trying to be strong, was slowly falling apart - just a little.

She told me that she felt God doesn't put too much on us to handle, but she was just kind of wondering. She said she had a bad feeling about Dad and that losing her brother, Uncle Dennis, just a few months prior was a bigger blow to her than she let on. Now her mother was sick. I told her we would get through it, and then I laughed to myself. It’s like who's needing whose shoulder here. I hadn't realized Dennis being such a loss to her and it may sound cold and selfish to you, but that was because he wasn't that big of a loss to me.

You see he and my mother didn't get along until about a year before he passed. He was a reformed alcoholic and a wife beater and I remember having candid conversations with Ann, his wife. She was more Googles’ age than that of Dennis or my mother. I had very little or no respect for him, and as my mother cried to me to tell me he died, I felt nothing. Sorry. So, I had to learn quickly that this revelation my mother made to me was something I couldn't squawk at or make fun of. She was seriously grieving him, so I just held her hand and we waited to hear how my father was to recover.

I told my mother I was going to get some coffee. Little did I know she and I were actually heading to the same place, outdoors for a much-needed smoke. I had no cigarettes on me, because it wasn't a habit yet. I figured I'd bum or buy one off of somebody else because sure enough I was stressed and just knew somebody else would be. I actually had choices, as there were about a dozen or so smokers outside taking a break from their respective loved ones.

As I sipped on my vending machine coffee, I wondered why I felt so bad about the way I felt about Uncle Dennis. I wondered if my dad would pull through his lengthy surgery. It was just a time for wondering the unknown. I lit up my bummed cigarette and inhaled. I no more than exhaled, when my dear mother was tapping me on my shoulder.

Usually, I would have expected her to be sarcastic or perhaps slap me, or say a prayer on the spot, but much to my surprise she only asked how long and how often did I smoke. She told me to not act like I had to do it behind her back anymore either.

"Because, my sonny, when the smoke clears...ah ha... the truth always comes out," she admonished.

We laughed, if only for a minute.

*

I got home from a hard days work and a meeting, only to find my dear mother pacing the floor. She stopped me in the kitchen and told me that she bought my beeper for me for a reason and just knew I was more responsible than the way I was acting. I apologized all over the place because my dad had fallen out of bed again and this time, in his medicated state, there was absolutely no way I would be able to get him back in bed, without causing him much harm. Mom and I tried to pick him up, but she was too challenged herself in the health and strength department.

I called Frankie, Anya's dad, over. He was always a great neighbor to us and was quite the handy man. If it hadn't been for him, I don't know what we would have done. We couldn't get over how weak my dad was. He had since started radiation treatments and the pain he was in was unbearable to him - this from a man who rarely complained. That was it, though. That's what really got my mother and me. Who knows how long that all had been brewing in his body?
We figured for several months to over a year, he was always with his back to the wall - looking like he was scratching or something. Then he started going to specialists, then chiropractors. They just told him it was his degenerative arthritis doing a number on him, at a rapid and steady pace. We just held on to hope, knowing he could be worse off - dead or crippled by what was eating him from the inside.

Frankie was great. He was always joking around, so much so that he could be downright annoying at times, but that day his humor was right on time. He even made my father laugh, which was a miracle in and of it self. My father was a lot like him, always joking around and telling stories from when he was a boy; and from his Army days. He was very proud of me. Why? I never knew, but he would always tell his friends all the things I was doing. That's why it was so difficult to see him that way, on the floor - defeated.

Frankie no more than left, then it was up to Googles flat where I, once again, discovered her sprawled out on the living room floor. This time she had been up there all day long like that, longer than before and she couldn't get up. I sat there on the chair in her living room and we talked. I called on the phone down to my mother. Now, mind you, my mother was unable to go up and down stairs. She had a history of blood clots in her legs. She would from time to time, but at that time with her being on blood thinners, having fought diabetes all her life, kidney problems, weight problems... My poor mother was a walking medical encyclopedia. So, I found it wise to call her to see what the next step was.

"Mom, I hate to tell ya, but Googles fell again." She was uncharacteristically silent.

"Don't just blurt it out like that, baby," said Googles. She apparently failed to see the seriousness of her own situation.

"Can you help her into her bed?" My mother and I were both hoping.

"No. She's hurt her arm. Last time she was able to balance herself by wrapping her arms around my neck. This time she can't. I think it may be broken."

"We might have to call an ambulance. She won't like that." My mother knew this was going to be a hard sell, but I would have to be the one to sell it.

"Oh, we will!" I told Mom, “We have to.”

I hung the phone up.

First of all, ever since Googles had her stroke some year’s prior, aside from very important doctor's appointments, she hardly left the house. The closest she got to the outdoors was when she cracked the door to her porch open. On a good day she’d throw a few slices of bread to the birds. My friends often mused on whether we had someone living up there at all. Maria would joke that it was like Mrs. Bates from Psycho. She would ask if my grandmother was really alive, because she would never hear her walking around or anything. That was true. Googles was very quiet in her own powerful way. She loved her movies and books and that was about it. That and sitting in her chair thinking.

Thinking about her life, her children - both with their own problems, but lived their lives the best way they knew how. I often wondered what Googles thought of her damaged children and of my mother's damaged children. Where did it start in our line? Did it start from her? And if it did: Why? Why was she so bitter? Sure, her husband left her, but I always thought she was stronger because of it. She seemed to brood a lot, but would laugh it off.

She wasn't laughing now.

How often did she think of her strained relationship with them? And even though her and my Uncle Dennis made amends in the eleventh hour, how did she feel about his going before her? I am sure it weighed on her mind and her very soul heavily. A woman, who once thrived and had so many in her life, now had just a handful as her very backbone. She was devastated over my father. He was like another son to her.

My father, despite losing his patience with her time and again, in turn loved Googles as if she were a second mother. My dad loved my mother tremendously and treated her mother like the Queen Mother herself. She was very special to him and, in time, the feeling was mutual. She ached at the thought of his suffering and she took time out, as she lay on her living room floor, panting, to tell me how sad she suddenly had become. She commented on the fact that my father was still a young man. I believed her when she said that she would willingly trade places with him.

Be careful what you wish for, for you may only be joining one in their misery.

I helped her to a sitting position and she asked me about my dad. She hadn't known yet, and I hated to, but I told her we just picked him up off the floor. She found it peculiar that they both had fallen on the same day, twice. She was not alone in her wonderment of the coincidence.

When I began to tell her we might have to call an ambulance because I thought she broke her arm and was definitely dehydrated, she wanted nothing of it. She said after all she's done for me and given me, I had to promise her that I wouldn't let my mother put her in a nursing home.
I explained to Googles that some things we had no control over. I understood her fears. She had them driven into her own mind that being put into a nursing home, no matter how well-established it was, would surely be the end of her days.

She refused to see how burdensome the situation was becoming. I won’t lie. It was definitely becoming a burden. So many people run around lying to themselves, or worse lying to others, saying their ill loved ones aren't "a burden at all." Bullshit! They can be downright pains in the ass. I am not ashamed to say it, but that's because I knew full well putting Googles into a nursing home was what was best for not only her, but all involved and we certainly were not the type of people who would just leave her there to rot.

I told her that we just needed to get her to a doctor, but she wouldn't have anything of me calling 911. She no more than said it again and I got up, went to the phone in her bedroom and called a private ambulance. That way we would be able to send her where we wanted. When I came back to her in the living room, I can barely put words to the expression on her face. She looked devastated, like she could not believe I had betrayed her in such a way. It didn't faze me in the least. I felt like I was taking control over a situation I once had very little control over.

*

My mother shocked both of us. She had made her way upstairs to Googles flat and her timing was that of a good comedian. She sat and had a cigarette with Googles, as I went to keep one eye on Dad and the other on lookout for the ambulance. My mother came back down a little while later, just as the ambulance pulled up. She instructed me to follow the ambulance in the car, to keep Googles company in the hospital. I thought to myself how much I would hate to wait in another hospital waiting room, but that old guilt crept in quickly and I knew I would do what I was told.

Watching my dear Googles be handled by the emergency medical technicians was painful. She seemed like a little girl. I think she knew in her hardest of hearts that it would be the last time she'd see her home. That she would never return. She had tears in her eyes. She was fit to be tied.

They ended up admitting her into the hospital. She could not care for herself at home. I was told to relay to my mother that Googles would need to be placed in a nursing home. I find it ironic to this day, but something else was quelling beneath the surface of Googles very being. Within a few days, after all her bitching and whining, tests and more tests, visits with Mom and Uncle Ralph - my beloved, dear Googles was diagnosed with the same exact small cell carcinoma lung cancer that my father had.

Unlike Dad, Googles would end up opting out of the cruel radiation treatments.

She would be strong.

She was determined.

She seemed even willing to face God, a being she had given up on many years before.

She'd face him long enough to shake her finger in His very face.

Maybe she'd even give Him a good whack at His foul sense of humor.

She was going to ride that pony out for as long as she could.

Then she would leave this earth - laughing.

...but she would ride it bitter and cold, devastated and misunderstanding the many wonders of the body, mind and soul... of life....

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Opening the Naked Window is available for purchase at >>>>AMAZON<<<< and other fine online retailers. Thanks!

Photos (l-r): My beloved Googles as a little girl...with my Uncle Ralph and Gramma Lou & Googles circa 1992 during one of our many awesome conversations about movies, music & current events, which I touch on throughout the series.

Memoir Journal: I had a lot of challenges writing my life story. I was very careful, as I touch on a variety of topics that affected me and the people involved whose presence, whether constant or a fleeting moment...the details lay in the randomness and the continual coming and going of many different characters. The almost vagrant approach to developing these characters based on real people from my life is intentional. People come and go in all of our lives, but I have seen so many pass through my line of sight due to life events and/or choices that I was very specific in giving that almost voyeuristic view on my own life. People like Googles, they are the constants that I plan to really touch on in the final book of the series that I am slowy working on this and next year.