The Wolf at the Door

I wanted to rally yesterday, but I was still feeling punky.  I wanted to get out of the house, but I sat.  I talked to my mother and told her I was still feeling poorly.  It was ten.  I futzed around some more and wondered how much of my illness was mental.  I decided I had to put on some shoes and go.  I grabbed my big Fuji camera and headed to a part of town I decided I wanted to photograph a week or so ago.  

I parked my car around the corner on a side street beside the Goodwill on a busy highway on the east side of town.  Most of the businesses are Asian, but this is not the hip part of Little Hanoi where the expensive bars and restaurants abide.  This part is run down and filled with nail and lashes shops, massage and acupuncture salons, mixed martial arts gyms, tax preparation offices, a skateboard shop, and weirdly enough, the Haitian Embassy.  

Right?  

I grabbed my bag and walked around the corner.  On the sidewalk a crazy man was dancing and yelling at cars and passerby's.  O.K. I thought.  Just a nice Sunday afternoon. It was getting hot.  Just a few yards more, there was a fellow sitting in a low camp chair on the sidewalk with his possessions around him.  I don't have interest in photographing human misery which is all too common here, but I raised my camera to my eye to photograph a building across the highway.  When I turned back, the man addressed me.  

"Are you from Seattle?"

"What?  No." I laughed.  "Why would you think that?"

"Where are you from?"

"Here.  I live here."

"Oh, you just looked like you were from Seattle.  I know a woman in Seattle.  I thought you were a tourist taking pictures."

"Well that would be a strange vacation photo, wouldn't it?"

"How much did you pay for that camera?"

"Not as much as it cost when it was new.  Here. I'll take a picture for you," I said.  

"O.K.  Wait a minute.  I have a picture in here."  

He began searching through the bag at his feet searching through the many sheafs of papers, pictures, objects and who knows what, mumbling all the while.  He couldn't find what he was looking for and started again.  Then. . . BINGO. . . he pulled out a drugstore print of a girl.  

"I want this in the picture.  Can you see it?" 

He held it onto his chest.  

"Yes," I said.  

"I want to send it to her."

I took the photo for him, not for me.  

"She's from Seattle," he said. 

"Here, let me take on of you not smiling."

"You don't want me to smile?"

"No."

"O.K.  Let me get something first."

Again he dove into his bag, searching, and in a minute he brought out a little gold chain with a pendant and slipped it over his head.  

"Do you have someplace you want me to send these?"

"Oh. . . yea. . . here. . . ."

He reached down to fumble in his bag again.  He had pads of paper that he skipped over looking for some scrap, I guessed.  I'd been with him about ten minutes now.  He was still digging.  

"Why don't you just tear off a little piece from that pad?" I asked.  

"Oh . . ."

He started writing something very slowly as if he were trying to remember.  When he handed me the slip of paper, I saw that he had written down a P.O. address.  

"O.K. my friend.  I'll send you copies."

"O.K." he said.  "Take care."

"Wow!" I thought, "Just getting out of the house. . . "

I walked slowly down the street taking photos of billboards and signs and shop windows.  Then I came to what appeared to be a popular restaurant.  In the parking lot, I saw three young girls walking toward the entrance.  We reached the walkway about the same time.  One of the girls was half Asian and wearing an outrageous outfit--a fur hat with earflaps, fur boots that came halfway up her shins, and the smallest jeans shorts she could legally wear.  Her eyes were darkly outlined and her lips were bright red.  

Oh shit. . . oh shit. . . .  I'd photographed one person.  Maybe I was on a roll.  As they approached, I raised my camera in the air and said, "I just have to ask."  She hesitated, smiled, then looked at her friends.  I knew this was a bad sign.  She looked back to me and shook her head minutely in the negative, but her face was saying yes.  Fuck, fuck, fuck. . . I just smiled and put the camera to my side and nodded.  

Piss shit fuck goddamn. . . it would have been a perfect bookend to the photo of the Goodwill man.  But hell, I was looking pretty homeless, I guessed, and so the fellow on the sidewalk engaged me.  I needed to look young and hip, I assumed, to get the other picture.  

"You just look like a creepy old man with a camera," I laughed to myself without humor.  

I spent the next couple of hours walking about but didn't get any more pictures of humans, just the dilapidated buildings and closed businesses that I tried to make look interesting.  When I got back to the car, I decided to drive to a different part of town, more distant, to make some photos of things I had in mind.  But more of that in other days.  

When I got home, I was beat.  I had done alright, but I still wasn't feeling well.  I made a little salad and had part of a beer, then ran a hot tub and crawled in.  It was three.  By the time I had finished my soak and had showered, it was four.  I took the card out of my camera and downloaded the day's images into the computer.  As I did, the phone rang.  It was in the kitchen, and so I didn't answer.  A bit later, it rang again.  It was the tenant.

"Are you o.k." she asked?  

"Yea, why?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm at home."

"Your mother called me and said she has been calling you and couldn't reach you and she said she was afraid because you said you weren't feeling well."

"Jesus, what the fuck?  I was in the tub and shower."

"Well call her back.  She's worried."

That's it, though.  I can't have even hours to myself any longer.  I was just getting into the car when I called my mom and told her I was on my way to see her.

"O.K.," she said.  

My mother was in her room when I got to the rehab center.  She wanted to go sit in the t.v. room.  She got her walker, and she was slow, slower than she has been.  She was looking very frail and deformed, her shoulders and arms getting thinner.  When we got to the tv room which is connected to the dining room, she stopped and looked around.  She was in pain, she said.  She wanted medicine.  She just stood and looked at everyone who walked by thinking they would give her something.  They were servers and janitors and I don't know what all, but they weren't nurses.  My mother couldn't tell.  Finally, she turned and took a chair.  That meant we wouldn't be sitting together on the couch which meant we couldn't easily talk.  On the big tv was the after game football show, so I watched the highlights of the day's games while my mother stared out through cataract eyes.  It was quarter 'til five.

"They are going to serve dinner at five.  Let's go in and get a table," she said.

"Whatever you want."

She sat down at a table with someone else's drink on it.  I sat beside her.  We were the only ones in the dining room.  

"I'm not really hungry," my mother said.  "We just had lunch."

"And yet you are the first to the table."

One of the servers came over and asked my mother if she would like the soup.

"No," she spat with a hillbilly distaste.  "I didn't like it at lunch."

I felt a little embarrassment, but I was sure that they see this sort of thing here all the time.  

"The food has gotten worse," she said.  "When I first got here, it was good, but now. . . I think they only give you the good food when you first get here."

A nice woman who has been sitting with and talking to my mother came out.  

"Have a seat," my mother said, but mom had picked a littered table, so the woman sat at the table next to us.  The server brought my mother a plate of food.  

"What's that," the woman at the next table asked me?

"Beats me."

The plate had two pieces of meat, one white and one brown, and a roll.

"Is that it?" asked the lady at the next table. 

"That's all she ordered," said the server.  

"I don't know how to order," my mother said, and it was true.  I don't know why, but she cannot fill out a menu card.  

"Would you like some vegetables?"

"Sure," my mother said offhandedly.  The hillbilly was just coming out of her all over.  

The server brought out vegetables, a fruit cup, a desert, and a salad.  Just then, a man rolled his way in slowly in a wheelchair.  He joined the lady at the other table.  He was fairly formal of speech and said he hadn't been coming down for his meals because of his catheter.  He was embarrassed, he said.  We made introductions and they brought him his food.  

"The food here is great," he said.  I laughed inwardly at my mother.  It turned out that the man had been at another rehab center.  It hadn't been nearly as nice.  

"Yes, this is the nicest rehab place in town," I said.  

"The other place was horrible.  No, everyone is nice and attentive here, and the food it good."

My mother has been arguing with everyone because her call bell/light isn't working in her room. 

"I've had some minor strokes, they say.  They can't fix my light so they gave me a bell to ring.  Can you imagine?  I tried it but nobody came.  They don't know how to fix my call button.  Isn't that something?"

I understood her concern, but my mother was getting very negative and mean about everything.  

I noticed the fellow had a full sleeve that was very colorful, so I asked him when he got it.  

"When I was married, I was always faithful to my wife.  She was the love of my life, and as long as I stayed in those boundaries, I could do anything I wanted.  So when I retired. . . " and here he got very confused.  He said he retired in 2022 and then seven years later. . . it wasn't making sense.  

"I had always been interested in tattoos, but I worked for IBM and they wouldn't have allowed that.  When I retired from there, I decided to get a job with a prosthetic company, and almost everyone there had tats, so I decided to get this.  I always thought I had it made when my wife was alive.  I thought I was King of the World, but she died and now this. . . and I know that I am not."

Yup.  I looked at him and wondered something I didn't ask, then he mentioned his age.  He was barely older than I.  

My mother didn't really say anything during the dinner conversation.  She has never been a good conversationalist.  She complains that other people don't let her talk, but when she does, she says maybe two sentences at most.  The lady and the gentleman were talking about how well their children treated them.  Thye came to see them several times a week.  I waited.  My mother said nothing.  I could only seethe a little.  

When dinner was done, I excused myself to go home.  

"Ya'll have made me hungry," I lied.  And so I kissed my mother and said goodbye.  

I had planned on getting fish tacos for dinner, but when I got home, I hadn't the energy.  I'd scrape together something from what I had lying around.  I made a Negroni.  Not quite.  I forgot to add the gin.  Good, I thought.  I need to quit drinking these anyway.  I put together a salad with bread lettuce, avocado, Campari tomatoes, and garbanzo beans, poured a big glass of wine, sat down and turned on the t.v. 

I put on the film, "The Wolf at the Door."  I hadn't seen it since 1986 when I took my young friend to the theater.  I was whisked right back to the time and place.  I could feel it and taste it and smell it.  The movie ethos was a great reflection of my dead ex-friend Brando's.  Or vice-versa.  Such characters can't exist any longer.  But they did.  Men as rogues, adventurers, in love with women and food and drink and drugs.  Sex was close to being religion.  I winced once again remembering taking the girl to see the film.  It is told partly through the narrative voice of the 14 year old daughter of Gaugin's Paris landlord.  She is fascinated.  She undresses for him.  She wants him to paint her.  Gaugin tells her of his wife in Tahiti.  

"How old was she?"

He pauses.  "She was thirteen." 

When this scene came on, I grabbed my phone to record it.  Sorry for the shitty quality, but it doesn't matter.  Here is the philosophy, Brando's philosophy in life.  He, too, was a rogue who abandoned his children.  

It was still early when the film was over, but I decided to go to bed.  I felt sleepy and took nothing, but I woke at two in a panic.  I jumped out of bed. What to do?  I walked around trying to calm myself, and went back to bed.  At three-thirty, the same thing.  I was crying out and thrashing violently.  My heart was racing.  I decided to take a Xanax and try again.  But it was of no use, and early this morning I rose for good.  

I have a billion and a half things to do today.  I hope I can manage one.