Carolina

As strange as this may be, it's not fiction. A song triggered a memory.

After the old man had his emergency open heart surgery, the cold winter of New York was made worse by the lack of heat in the basement apartment he was renting on 107th Street in Ozone Park. He was suffering but refused to leave New York. I headed to Florida to set up down there so he could come down to the warmer climate; I knew the new scars he had would always ache in the cold. He didn't want to be a bother. I couldn't fix it. I could prepare. A 1985 Cadillac Eldorado got me from New York to Orlando. Time passed. A woman flittered through my life. Friends were revisited. Life moved on.

It was the winter of 1996. I'd been working for the Central Florida Blood Bank for almost a year after having gotten out of the Navy. I'd traded in that old ugly Eldorado when the transmission went for a 1995 Dodge Dakota, getting screwed at 18.6% interest but needing to get to work more than I didn't want a car payment. I was on a blood drive for the Blood Bank when the phone on the bus rang, telling me that my father was found not breathing in his apartment by his girlfriend. Paramedics were there. They patched me through, I spoke to them briefly. No one knew how long he hadn't been breathing.

I headed to the apartment, grabbed some underwear, socks and shirts and a windbreaker and drove to New York that night, all night, making it in about 20 hours in that Dodge Dakota, fumbling around for old phone numbers in a notebook to find out which hospital he was in, where I could stay.... I headed to my father's apartment that night. When I got there I called around to find my father's condition was serious. His landlord - an idiot named Persaud - knockec on the door and rushed to the top of the stairs. He told me I couldn't stay there because my father owed him rent and because the gas bill was high. Even explaining the situation didn't help, pleading the case and telling him I would take care care of things once I saw about my father. I hadn't even seen my father yet. I remember staring at him, through him, past him, and I recall he stepped back and back into his apartment as I started walking up those stairs with a purpose I did not know. I do not know what would have happened had he not gone back in that apartment but in retrospect I am happy I didn't have to find out.

My backpack in tow, I hopped into the pickup and headed to my father's girlfriend's place. Then, in the morning, to Jamaica Hospital. There I saw my father who was in a diabetic coma. I'd seen the 10 orange peels in the garbage at the house, garbage that my father never let sit in the apartment longer than a day. His girlfriend, who was still living with her ex-husband (!), told me she found him in the apartment, that she had cooked a lot of food for some Hindu prayers - food that, by and large, is all carbohydrate and little else. So my diabetic father had eaten all of that, had probably been thirsty and ate oranges to quench his thirst. And there he lay on a hospital bed, no one certain how long his brain had gone without oxygen. Unconscious. Unresponsive.

Meanwhile, one of his friends from Trinidad was to visit. Steve and his wife showed up, we all ended up staying at my father's girlfriend's place with her ex-husband, two children. I visited the hospital for a few days, finally resorting to pinching my father's ears to get through to him and failing. It didn't look good. I think the happiest day in my life was the next day when he came to, complaining about his ear hurting and happy to see me. He rested. He, Steve and I talked about his financial situation, about his health situation, and we got him to agree to go back to Trinidad with Steve and stay with him for a while. An indeterminate while. But the finances remained an issue.

My father had stacks of boxes of noodles in the apartment from Trinidad, stuff he had imported from a friend who ran Jo Singh noodles at the time in the hope that he could turn a buck while they got an export market. I had a pickup. With Steve and his wife in tow, we went to sell those noodles - better, I went and they accompanied me. And I sold those noodles at about $10 a box in Brooklyn, got paid and hopped in the pickup. Steve asked for the money, said he wanted to be sure that my father got it. I stared at him. He didn't trust me. After all the crap I'd been through in the last few days, I had to put up with that. I threw my hands up. I handed him that money so that he could give it to my father, allowing him to take the act of giving my father that money away from me. He'll never know the simmering stew of emotions that sat next to him in that single cab pickup as I ran he and his wife around on errands throughout New York City, a favor to my father, as my father lay in a hospital bed. But it's what my father wanted, so I sucked it up. He never knew about that. I never told him. He didn't need to know. In retrospect, he probably wouldn't have wanted to. It's those things that we do that aren't appreciated that stew beneath the surface. I should have told him.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend was driving his minivan without permission and got into an accident. She was at fault; that much I recall, and she ended up in the same hospital the floor below him. She begged me not to tell him about it, telling me that it would make his condition worse. I knew my father and knew he would want to know; I told him after I visited her.

In the end, I was up there for about 2 weeks - not working, not getting paid, living off of what I had put away. None of the running around for Steve or anyone else came out of their pockets, it had all come out of mine. There was no place or time for me to be alone; I was always cluttered with people more interested about themselves than my father or, for that matter, myself. With only a few hundred bucks left in the bank and a long road trip ahead, I parted ways with my father in that winter of 1996. The solitude of the road beckoned. There, I could be in control again. With my father's situation improved, we parted ways while he was still in the hospital. I left at night, telling everyone that I wanted to avoid the traffic getting in and out of New York. That was partly true.

The radio blaring, the heater on full tilt to keep me warm and the engine cool, I pulled out late that night. I stopped for coffee wherever I could; I smoked cigarettes like an actor in a black and white movie, I flipped through radio stations like musical vines on the black top jungle. I lost myself somewhere between 4th and fifth gear as I left New Jersey behind. I yelled and screamed at no one in particular on the empty road, felt a bit better, locked Orlando in my sites and pushed that 4 cylinder Dakota to its limits on the way home. Back then it cost $19 to fill up my tank. It cost about $1.29 for a large cup of trucker coffee. There was a simple pleasure in going through places where people go through; no one knew each other, people were polite, no one asked questions and no one troubled you with their problems. I'd had enough of that. I'd had about enough of everything at that point.

Darkness covered that journey, and as the sun began to rise the pickup was soundly in 5th gear going at a speed that would make a Chrysler engineer proud (though it was a Mitsubishi engine), the windows down, pine trees as far as I could see along the road. "Welcome to North Carolina", the sign said, and this song played on the radio.

After all of that, a perfect moment.