Go Big or Go Home

We also owned the town pharmacy for 40 years. The place was a soda fountain shop where everyone in town hung out and my grandfather was the guy behind the counter. They moved in at the end of the Depression, made it through the 1950s American boom quite well, then through hippies stealing over-the-counter drugs, through punk rockers stealing over-the-counter bandages, and then he retired in 1986 when I was 4 years old. I don’t remember it in there but the place was underground down this huge staircase and smoking was allowed inside, I’m told. My grandfather smoked three packs of Camel unfiltereds a day for 60 years, but that isn’t what killed him.

I’m waiting in my car in the rain, listening to the windshield wipers sound like low trombones back and forth and thinking about Ash’s funeral and how heavy carrying the front right foot of that casket on my shoulder was. His uncle had to run ahead and help me hold it up or I would have dropped the thing, really, when Rupert runs up to my car and knocks on the window.

“It rain all day,” he says to me, getting in the passenger side seat. “Hello, Nicolle.”

He is not wearing a floppy yellow fisherman’s rain hat, but rather, an expensive black winter coat.

“There are tissues in the glove box,” I say to him. “Hi, Rupert.”

Is it a bad idea to let a conman into your glove box? I ask myself.

“Walkie talkie, here,” he says to me.

“Do I? What do I like, do with it?”

The absurdity here is typical. This is typical. It’s go big or go home with my father.

“Channel six. They will message you. I have to build the staircase.”

He opens the car door into the rain.

“Rupert, do you want a ride?”

But he has already vanished into the rain.

I get out to go into the diner to eat dinner with Ash’s mom, the old coot.

“You know your grandfather died?” She’s wiping down the counter.

“Yeah I heard.” I sit on a stool.

“He could yell. Your grandfather.”

The old bird pours me a cup of coffee.

“When I was in high school, he was just starting the pharmacy. One time, I asked him about a peroxide to lighten my hair. See my roots?” She leans into the counter, smiling. “That man had windpipes.”

“They say that.” I sip the coffee.

“People used to hang out at the top of the stairs of the pharmacy out front in the street playing music from cars at all hours of the night and he’d come up and yell at everybody to go get lost.” She smiles more. “And your grandmother was the prettiest girl in town. But hot damn was he mean to her.”

She walks to the end of the counter.

“Yeah, thanks for that,” I say to her, the evil old bag.

“You hungry?”

“Starving,” I answer.

The thing, one of the things I’m the most pissed about involving this funeral, is seeing Johnson. We are the same age and his family is friends with my family and he’s always at family events. Been that way my entire life. I’m still pissed at him because of the time he roofied me. He’s a psychiatrist and he’s always dosing me. One time, I was at a dinner at Johnson’s mother’s house, and on the way out he handed me a styrofoam cup of coffee for the road. I drank it driving and halfway through the car ride I fell asleep at the wheel and ended up in an embankment. The ER doc said I had a bunch of anti-anxiety medication in me that must have caused me to doze off. Priorly, I didn’t have a prescription for any kind of medicine, nevermind a roofie-worthy one. When the doctors saw this fact I had to answer like 10 hours of questions such as “Am I a drug addict? Am I a drug dealer? Do I need a manual?” That bastard is always roofying me.

“I must have thought it was a Tylenol,” I kept saying to everyone.

I knew that coffee tasted chalky.

Took me two days to hammer out my car bumper back into smooth condition, too. While I whispered to Ash up in heaven and swore I’d ignore Johnson forever.

“What the hell you got there?” Ash’s mother tosses me a plate of waffles, nods at the walkie talkie.

“It’s my communication device,” I answer her.

“That thing get the President on the line? I got a bone to pick.”

My grandfather got nicer over the years. He’d had six heart attacks five triple bypass surgeries a bunch of strokes. One day, he woke up in the hospital from a stroke and he was nice. No more name calling at anyone, no more yelling. Just “Hello how are you today?” and “Yes I believe I would like some orange juice.” It was like all that work my grandmother had put in waiting on him hand and foot as an American housewife suddenly came back to comfort her. There were no more complaints about dinner, no more yelling something was wrong. No more one liners: “You can only see what’s wrong with it when you’re looking at it.” No more bossing around. For the next few years, my grandmother had the husband she’d always wanted. Then my aunt got sick and died at 48 and my grandfather stopped talking. Not a word for years. Then he falls down, breaks his foot and goes to the ER this week. That’s how it happens when you’re old, you fall down. Gravity wins in the end. So they’re sending him home, foot casted up and he writes a note and hands it to the doctor. The note reads, “I’d like to thank everybody who has helped me.” Then he dies of an aneurism right there in the chair on his way home from the hospital.

“You want syrup for the waffles?” Ash’s mom asks me.

I turn the knob on the walkie talkie and static comes through.

“Nicolley turn that thing down in here before I deep fry it.” Ash’s mom looks up from the counter, the old coot.

So much static. I wait for it to ring like a telephone and for Ash to be talking on the other end but that doesn’t happen.

The minutes outside the building before the funeral are 100 old people talking about my mother. My mother was a beautiful woman. Being the daughter of a very beautiful woman in a very small town is a very specific thing. It’s been 25 years, and still, these people talk about how beautiful my mother was.

I walk inside and there is my father, standing like he’s an usher, holding a walkie talkie.

“Where is your radio?” he asks me.

He hugs me.

“It’s in the car, Dad,” I mumble into his armpit.

“Keep it on during the procession line.”

I appreciate that he isn’t forcing me to sit in the row with Johnson. I walk into the front of the temple with my father, thinking about Johnson wielding a psychiatry syringe full of brainwashing potion at me: “You will love me now. You will not think of Ash; he is dead.” Johnson’s voice echoes in my head, imagined, here in this house of God.

My grandfather had two things funeral-related in his will. One was that during the eulogy, my father had to recite the lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way.”

The Rabbi says some things.

I get into my car and I turn on my headlights and I think about how at Ash’s funeral, I had a hard time standing up.

“Nicky, come in. Nicky. Dad to Nicky, over.”

There is always an answering machine in Julia Roberts movies. In every movie, there is someone leaving a message on her plastic black flat answering machine, and she is always banging at it and yelling at it and tearing it out of the wall and stomping on it.

“Nicky, come in. Thumb on button on side while talking, go, Nicolle.”

I actually pick up the walkie talkie.

It shrieks some kind of high-pitched squealing.

“Yes, Dad.” I actually say into the walkie talkie.

“Are you at the red light on Mill Street? Over.”

“Yes, Dad, that is me.”

This is typical.

“Copy, we see you, over.”

One left turn and we are entering the cemetery. Dozens of cars, 100 cars, descending through a forest, into this cemetery from 1616. A lot of old men in those weird veterans caps that look like a navy blue version of the Good Humor Man hats. Or Johnny Rockets uniform hats. They’re all using canes, they’re all hobbling. Three officers in uniform stand at attention next to my grandfather’s casket which is one plot over from my aunt’s casket. Steps lead up the hill to the headstones. Freestanding, unpainted wooden steps without hand railings that look like an art sculpture in the middle of a cemetery.

“That jackass Rupert didn’t finish building the steps, over,” my father says.

Johnson’s mother exits the limo like Cruella DeVille in a floor length black coat. From 50 yards and a hill of headstones away I can see a diamond broach the size of a golf ball on her left shoulder. Peskudnic is what Ash’s mother calls her sometimes. It means sour attitude in slang yiddish.

“We are walking to the people, over.”

The three officers in uniform start shouting in tandem. A man begins to play taps on a trumpet. My grandmother turns in the crowd to look for me, my grandmother nods at me through all of these people. The soldiers give my grandmother a folded-up flag in a bunch shaped like a triangle and they thank her on behalf of the President of the United States. The Rabbi says some things.

The second item my grandfather had in his will felt like half of the old him and half of the new him came to some kind of compromise. At a Jewish funeral, after the casket is lowered, every person there is supposed to take a handful of dirt and drop it into the grave. This symbolizes physically helping to give the dead a proper burial, this symbolizes leaving a part of yourself with the deceased. The second thing my grandfather had in his will was that he wasn’t to be lowered into the ground and buried until everyone had left the cemetery. He said watching his daughter’s burial was too much and he didn’t want his wife to have to see that.

“We are walking away from the grave, over.”

I get into my car and I wait until all of the cars have passed. I take another glance at my grandfather’s casket, sitting alone on the hillside next to his daughter. I look at the two men there to bury him.

Back at my grandmother’s house, people are noshing on white fish and lox, people are talking about my aunt. My grandmother has to excuse herself to take not one but two insulin shots. She comes out of the bathroom and hugs me. I stand by the stairs, watching all these people in this room, imagining what it was like for them to go to the one jazz club in town in the 1950s dressed up like a Betty Davis movie when Johnson approaches. He starts to say something to me but is interrupted when he backs into an end table, knocking our family pictures all over the floor, shattering glass all over the place.

—Photo paparutzi/Flickr