Vespers

Things have been quiet with my father – too quiet. He’s had a busy winter: showing up drunk New Year’s Eve at the nursing home where my mother lives; getting caught cheating on the written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles; closing the living trust we had set up for him and my mother so Uncle Sugar doesn’t rape them on taxes; and arriving bombed out of his gourd at my niece’s middle-school basketball game. So quiet, that I knew we were overdue for another Dumbo-drop. Be careful what you wish for.

A week ago I was having a quiet evening at home, laying on the couch with the dog and watching some crappy Ben Afleck movie on Comcast On Demand, when the phone rang around 9:30. The caller ID read some cell phone number with an unrecognizable Illinois area code. I had no idea who the hell it was. When I answered the phone, it was some paramedic from Kane County, saying they had found my father 70 miles from home driving his car through a corn field.

“Does your father drink,” the paramedic asked. “He seems very confused and disoriented. Does he suffer from dementia?”

For those of you who have kept up with PDD, you’ve read about how my father had decided it would be a good idea to become an alcoholic at age 79. He’s had a rough couple of years and it’s taken a toll on him, being the main caregiver for my mother who is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, until we placed her in a nursing home two years ago this month.

I didn’t want to say too much to the paramedic, because no doubt my father had decided to take a drive along with a fifth of vodka. Instead, I told the paramedic that my father had been showing signs of dementia. I could hear my father screaming “fuck you” in the background.

“Your father is very vocal,” the paramedic said.

I asked if anyone was hurt. My father was okay, except for a light pole he hit in Elgin on his way to the cornfield. The paramedic put a Kane County deputy sheriff on the phone. He said they weren’t going to charge my father with a DUI, but were going to take him to a hospital in Geneva, Ill.

“Do I need to bring bail money?”

The cop said no, they would put down the cause of the accident as dementia and low blood sugar. I’m sure that all my father had to eat that entire day was one of his favorite Healthy Choice meatloaf microwave dinners washed down with half a fifth of rot-gut vodka. I have to say that for cops, the Kane County sheriff’s police were pretty darn nice.

“Uh, you’re not going to let him drive any more, are you,” the cop asked.

I assured him that my father’s days on the road were officially over. My boyfriend let me borrow his truck and cell phone, in case my own ran out of juice, which had just enough power left to play my “Chico and The Man” ring tone. I called my younger Romberg to deliver the news: “They found dad driving through a fucking cornfield.”

I scribbled on the first of many tiny pieces of paper and backs of envelopes that would accumulate over the week with phone numbers for doctors, social workers, insurance adjustors, desk sergeants, banks, cab companies, senior care services and psychiatrists. I stopped at 7-Eleven on my way out of town and bought myself a jumbo-sized coffee, and set out for the middle of Ass Fuck, Ill., having no idea where I was going.

I got lost getting off the toll way, making a wrong turn and driving about five miles out of my way. I learned an important lesson: Mapquest sucks and is not to be trusted. I turned around in an office building’s parking lot, where another Kane County deputy sheriff was parked trying to catch speeders. He must have heard about my father driving through the corn field, because he told me I was about twenty miles away from the hospital where they had taken him.

I turned around and headed into the right direction and got lost again following some directional signs for another hospital. (Ironically, it was the hospital I was born at.) My “Chico and The Man” ring tone kept going off, and I was weaving all over the road fielding calls from my sister-in-law and the security guard who had been stationed in the emergency room to watch my old man. I got pulled over by the same cop that I had asked directions from about fifteen minutes earlier.

This cop was also really nice. He stopped traffic so I could make a U-turn and get back on the right road, heading in a southerly direction. “Just keep going. You got a long way.”

I finally made it to the hospital. When I arrived at the emergency room, I could hear my father singing at the top of his lungs, “Barnacle Bill the sailor.” I could smell the vodka when I entered the curtained exam room. “’Ey, whooge dish gurl?”

My father was wearing a hospital gown and the security guard handed me a plastic bag from the hospital gift shop containing his clothes and shoes. “He had a little accident.”

My father insisted he had no memory of driving through a corn field, or hitting the light pole in Elgin. He kept asking, “What accident? I wasn’t in a fucking accident!” And then, “I loved that car.” I told him his driving days were over, and he started screaming and swearing again.

The security guard glared at me, “I had him calmed down. He was talking about the navy.”

I looked a bit like a raving maniac myself, wearing my cheap $8 winter jacket and in dire need of an evening of beauty. I spoke to this adorable, young, emergency room doctor, who told me he was waiting for the results of a cat scan. He told me that my father was very confused. “Yeah,” I thought, “crazy like a fucking fox.”

The doctor told me my father’s brain exhibited dark spots consistent with the early stages of dementia and that he had a B/A of 2.17, which is more than twice the legal drinking limit in Illinois. Eventually, the security guard helped get my father into scrubs and skid-socks so I could take him home.

It took two security guards to pile my dad into my boyfriend’s truck. “WHAT’S THIS FUCKING CAR YOU HAVE!” Then my father insisted that we had to go back and get his car. My dad is a big guy. The security guards told me to turn around and drive him back to the hospital if he started giving me a hard time. I had asked the emergency room doctor earlier if he could sedate my father and I’d pick him up in the morning, but the doctor told me to get him the hell out.

I was going to take my dad back to my house, but he was so belligerent, I decided to drive his ass back to his own place. It was black as pitch on the country roads, and I kept getting lost. I kind of knew where I was going and relied on my Zen method of finding places, which drives most of my family and friends crazy. (“Don’t you know where the hell you’re going?”)

The moon hung in the sky like a shiny peach quarter. My father kept remarking on it. I grilled him about how he ended up in Kane County, if he was going to Good Templar Park, a Scandinavian summer retreat where his mother and my mom’s mom had owned cottages, and where my parents had first met as teenagers. I could only surmise that he was taking a trip down memory lane in his big old Chrysler Concorde which was now totaled, with Artie Shaw blasting on the CD player.

I finally found a road that I was familiar with. I asked him if he needed to use the bathroom. He insisted that he didn’t, but ten minutes later he was screaming at me to pull over to the side of the road. “IT’S RUNNING DOWN MY LEG!” I pulled over and reminded him that he was wearing scrubs and had to pull them down. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY PANTS?” The last thing I wanted to see was my father’s shriveled-up, 80-year-old ball sack. I told him to hurry up before another cop pulled us over.

I finally got his ass home about 2:30 a.m. While he was trying to fit his key into the lock, I removed his driver’s license and Visa from his wallet because he was talking about renting a car the next day. I got him into the house and peed for the ride back home. I was exhausted from my trip through hell and just wanted to get home, pop a beer and go to bed.

On the way home, my “Chico and The Man” ring tone went off again. It was my father. “Someone came into my house and stole my vodka!”

Since last week, I’ve spent about nine hours a day on the phone or driving the 30 miles back and forth to my father’s house. My brother and I took him to see his own doctor and we admitted him for the weekend in another hospital, where he was sedated so he could safely detox from alcohol. I’ve filled up my gas tank about five times, paying $2.78 per gallon. I’ve talked to a million doctors, including my father’s own physician, who’s about as useless as tits on a pig and looks as if he spends 90 percent of his time in a tanning booth. Between all this, I’ve done some incredible multi-tasking, writing an article about a slum lord in Rogers Park who’s been jerking around his mostly poor tenants in a covert condo conversion for the paper that I freelance for. I’m exhausted.

I spent all day with my father yesterday, who is incredibly remorseful, taking him grocery shopping, trying to line up transportation options for him for his new life without a car. Today, I called the Kane County sheriff’s office, making sure that they had cited him for reckless driving so my old man can never get another driver’s license.

I’ve arranged a play date for my father at an adult day care program at a hospital near his house next week. We’re going to try that for awhile until my brothers and I can figure out what the hell we’re going to do with him. I’m sure that within a few weeks, my father will manage to get his ass kicked out of there, too.

I drove home yesterday hating myself. It is so fucking sad. My father used to be this powerful, capable guy. He always made me feel like a princess, even when I was a fat and ugly kid. I thought about better days: my father making paper airplanes out of the Cubs’ scorecards and floating them from upper grandstand at Wrigley Field, one of them even landing once on home plate during a game at Ernie Banks’ feet when he was up to bat. Lot’s of funny, crazy stuff like that.

I thought about Vespers, how my father’s world keeps shrinking and fading, and the encroaching dusk that is darkening his mind, like vapors rising off a pond.