"Dirty Old Grandpa"

GABRIEL

They say he's not well enough to come out of bed. Not today, at least. But when I get up the stairs and to his doorway, I see that he is sitting up in bed, doing a crossword puzzle, holding his oxygen mask over his face with one hand. The room smells like plastic and antiseptic and deep in my brain I miss the smell of cigarettes that I used to associate with him. I miss the smell of cuban cigars. I miss the ashtrays piled high around their house, the bitter smell characterizing the room. But in my immediate consciousness, I do not miss any of these things. I have long ago eradicated that emotion and even recalling what I know of this place is a task. Best not to think about it too much. 

Issuing from the CD player in the corner is familiar music, booming piano complete with the buzzing and clicking that mark an old recording. Something spanish maybe? 

Grandpa smiles and opens his arms, thin and shaking under his flannel pajamas. He is missing teeth and his grin is a macabre vision. I lean down to embrace him and I am surprised by his strength, the hardness of his arms that is not the hardness of bone. He pulls me down so that I have to kneel by the bed, he pats my back and lets me go. 

"What is this?"

"Lecuona," he says, complete with accent, "Poetico." 

"I remember," I say, "Spanish?" 

"Cuban," he corrects.

"You don't look so sick," I say.

I take my place in the chair by the bed, moving a stack of books: Ogden Nash, Poe, Wordsworth. There are more around the room, this room that used to be mine. 

"Hope you don't mind me moving in," he says. 

He folds his glasses and the newspaper and puts them down beside him. His eyes look like something congealed in their sockets, blinking but unseeing. Everywhere things are bonier, more discolored, more gnarled than when I last saw him, his hands all twisted with arthritis, marred by liver spots. And there is the smell, worse than the antiseptic and the plastic, the lingering smell of shit and decay that seems to characterize the nearly-dying. 

I tell him, "not at all. I'm happy to see you make good use of this old room."  

He folds his hands, relaxes, says, "tell your dirty old grandpa what you've been up to." 

I race through my past like shuffling through a deck of cards, contemplating what to tell him. Hustling? Prison? Scratching out a living for two years in some kind stranger's trailer out back? No, I decide. I'll focus on the positive. So I tell him,

"Actually, I just finished an adult film." 

He laughs that toothless, wheezy old-man laugh and slaps me hard on the knee, asks me what it's about. So I tell him in the film, I play a plastic surgeon who travels to Africa and risks his life to reconstruct the vaginas of mutilated women. The women of this particular tribe are so amazed by their ability to enjoy sex that they no longer want the men of their tribe; they want only me. So I spend the first half of the film reconstructing clitoral tissue, and the second half getting my dick polished by a tribe of big-breasted African women. 

I tell him it's socially conscious. Not for everyone. Grandpa laughs and starts to cough, I start to get worried. But then he says, "I'm glad I got to live to see this day." 

I cannot tell if he is thinking about the watch; if he even remembers it now. I cannot tell if he is thinking about the last time we saw each other. But he has never asked me about it; never brought it up in all the years since I left. It's always just been our secret, indicated only in a sideways glance and nothing more. 

But I think he will ask. Before this is all over, he will ask.

I ask him how mom has been and he says, "why don't you ask your father?" but laughs since he knows as well as I do that trying to get a straight answer from my father is like trying to get pussy from a nun. Then he gets serious and he says that she's been doing fine, that she has been doing fine for a few years, ever since she and my father became christians and all. 

"Do you really believe it?" 

"Believe what?" 

"That they're, you know, born-again." 

Grandpa shrugs.

"Hell if I know what that means. Your guess is as good as mine."

"Well, do they seem changed?" 

"No one really changes," he says, and he seems to be scanning his memory, taking an inventory of his experiences, every drop of wisdom he's got before coming to an answer, "they just think they do." 

He says I know that as well as he does. 

"But," he adds, seeing my frustration, "if I didn't know your father any better, I would believe in his conversion one hundred percent." 

I give him a wry smile, trying to pull, pull, until the truth comes out, shiny and squirming like a fish from under the rocks. 

"But you do know him." 

He smiles back, proudly displaying his rotting teeth, the black inside of his mouth.

"Oh yes," he says, "that I do." 

Grandpa doesn't really want to know what I've been doing. He thinks he does, but I know better. He's in no state to hear of the jail time, the dead-end jobs, the desperation and the loneliness that has been my life since I left here. He doesn't need to know about all the women, all the loss. He doesn't need to know about Elena. Not her. When I was young, my grandfather had this game, a game designed to stimulate my imagination, which was the only real thing I had protecting me from my father. My grandfather had tried to physically intervene, to threaten, to expose. But it didn't do any good. My mother and father were a good team, my mother was too much of a victim to do anything but protect my father. And she did it well. 

So when grandpa asks what I've been up to, I pretended, just like I did when I was ten. He would ask how school was, and I would tell him, depending on my age, that a stampede of elephants had destroyed the gymnasium, that I painted a mural in art class of the Pelopennesian war and an art dealer gave me a check for a million dollars for it. I would tell him that I crawled inside the grand piano in the music room and found my own secret wonderland, my own Oz. I would tell him all kinds of things and he would listen. Then it was back to the real world, back to my father. I suppose if I really look back, grandpa could have done more. But I don't like to think of it that way. I don't have enough time to think of him like that. I guess you could say my grandfather made me a good liar. The consummate liar that I am today.