Dad’s Last Drive

Posted on March 3, 2009

By Scott Tejerian

Ryan Adams’ “Let It Ride” from the Cold Roses album is cranking on “repeat” as I fly down the 10 West, from USC Medical Center to the Angeles Clinic in Brentwood. There’s something sadly optimistic about the song that feels like it’s meant for a road trip to heartbreak. It feels right because my dad is going to die, and the part of me not pissed off is pleased. This is what he deserves. This is his life lesson. I won’t make the same mistakes as him. I will listen to my son. I won’t challenge him on every idea. I will find inspiration and action in his words. But I drive fast anyway, for my mom and my sister, and because I’m not so heartless to let a man die—even if I know it could’ve been prevented if only he had listened to me.

From the look on the doctor’s face, we know the prognosis is grim. Even without the scans of dad’s liver—the ones I’m driving to retrieve—the doctor thinks surgery won’t be an option. He would need at least twenty percent of his liver to be free of the melanoma, and for a man whose liver’s so big he looks pregnant, the chances of that seem unlikely. But I drive fast anyway, knowing my dad is in pain and my family is counting on me.

I’m trying to be at peace with my father. For thirty-two years, I wanted him to listen, but it wasn’t critical until seven years ago when the first itsy bitsy, teeny tiny melanoma popped up on his retina. A check-up at the eye doctor, and congratulations, you have cancer! At twenty-five, it never occurred to me that my parents were mortal. My entire view of life shifted the moment the phone rang and dad said, “It’s nothing to worry about, but…”

A little laser beam took care of that teeny tiny, itsy bitsy melanoma on dad’s right retina. Hooray for modern medicine! Until six months later, when Tiny’s big bad brother showed up. No laser this time. Big bad brother refused to quit until they took dad’s right eye. But who needs two when you still have one?

Life went on. Dad was still walking, talking, laughing, and now he had a new set of lame jokes. His two favorites were covering his good eye and staring straight into the sun. Dad also enjoyed poking the marble with distressingly sharp objects. But beneath his veneer, and the jokes, I knew his new affliction was killing him emotionally. Though family and friends said Dad joked to put those around him at ease, I knew it was the other way around. Vanity had always been a weakness of Dad’s. Growing up in the family clothing store, image was everything. “When you look your best, you do your best” was a family motto. And now, for someone who took so much pride in his appearance, for the first few months after the surgery, he wouldn’t take a photograph unless he was wearing sunglasses.

Even I had trouble looking at him now. He looked different from the man whose home I shared for eighteen years. He still had that strength which always baffled me, but gone was his hair, replaced by something that looked like hair, and gone was his eye, replaced by something that looked like an eye, but I knew better. Gone was half of the window that shined a light into my soul. Gone was the joy and compassion along with the frustration and rage that marked it equally. Dad loved me more than he could express. We were certainly two souls guided through the cosmos on a collision. We shared humor and agitation. We’d laugh at the evening newsman and the obvious rug blanketing his dome, then years later clash over Dad’s decision to sew a carpet to his own head. I hurt his feelings sometimes, devastated him with the same extreme expectations he would burden on me.

My dad’s pride of appearance extended with the same extreme perfection to his home. He cherished yard work, and his passion for mowing, edging, planting and pulling weeds—dawn until dusk in his jeans, bandana and worn down white collared shirt, as he would faithfully every Saturday and Sunday—fueled my disdain of such work. I was reluctantly and defiantly dragged into the yard, weekend after weekend over ultimatums and fear of recourse. My body still cringes at the sound of a lawn mower. But it wasn’t the work: the mowing, the raking, the digging and planting and pulling weeds that bothered me. What fueled my anger and frustration were the years of battles over missed spots on the lawn and weeds left in the flowerbeds. Nothing satisfied Dad. Even when I did my best, I would inevitably fall short. Dad knew the names of every weed that invaded his yard— crab grass, spreading dayflower, bull paspalum, carpetweed—and made me learn them by sight and memory, because he was a freak that way. When I was done, like clockwork I would feel the avalanche of his disappointment.

At sixteen, after years of failed expectations, after screaming and yelling as we argued over who was right and wrong, it occurred to me that I had a license, keys to a car and that I didn’t have to be here anymore. I told Dad that I hated him and stormed off, swearing to never see him again. I ran to the car, scene blurred, seeing red, hearing only white noise. I started the car, threw it into reverse, turned the wheel and stomped on the gas peddle to freedom!

Bam.

Fuck!

I’d backed out of his driveway a hundred times and never turned the wheel in rage like now. This time, I smashed the back end of my car broadside into Dad’s. This was our relationship. This is how it was for years. And now Dad had cancer and what was I supposed to do? How could I adjust when so little had changed between us? It took years of staring at his glass eye to regain a sense of normalcy. For all of medicine’s miracles, how strange it was that we were reduced to taking a man’s eye. That taking it was the only way to save my dad from cancer. But would it? And if it didn’t, how would we make peace? I knew that teeny tiny melanoma and big bad brother weren’t alone—momma could come calling eventually. My grandmother died of bone cancer after having a double mastectomy. Two of dad’s uncles lost an eye. Some years later, the cancer returned and spread to their brains.

But, for awhile, I tried my best not to think about history. I convinced myself they had caught it early, that there was time for Dad and me to settle our differences. I lulled myself into thinking it wouldn’t come back. Until it did.

Next: “Dad’s Last Drive” part two

Scott Tejerian is a Los Angeles writer and contributor to Walkabout Jones.

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