MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Two

 

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”

― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again —

Continued from Part One -  

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2021/12/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you.html

It had all gone terribly wrong. The worst time of my life. 

I knew how bad it was for me, but not how bad it had been for my wife. While I’d been laid up in bed, the money had run out completely.

Our peso accounts were drained. We had a couple thousand dollars in US currency stashed away, but she was saving that for a rainy day—even rainier than the current one, that is. We had both worked at the newspaper, and when I walked out, I took Virginia with me, so we were both out of work at a time when there were no jobs to be had. She never talked about it. She merely kept finding ways to keep the house going. Among other things, she hocked all of her late mother’s jewelry. Family heirlooms, but she figured survival was more important.

And speaking of survival, she had no idea what was wrong with me. I had turned yellow from head to toe, including my eyeballs, and become gravely ill. I had no energy and couldn’t eat. My urine was the color of Coca-Cola. All I wanted to do was sleep.

They were exactly the same symptoms I’d had with infectious hepatitis when I was eleven. But I’d been told that you couldn’t have hepatitis twice. Once you’d had it, the virus stayed in your bloodstream for life, making you immune. Which was why, even in the Army, I had never been permitted to donate blood. There were, I’d heard, two infectious strains, A and B, but I’d never heard of anyone getting both. Whatever it was, I was no longer a kid. I was pushing forty and felt bad enough I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

Just before it all went south, when I still
thought it would all last forever.

But despite Virginia’s insistence, I refused medical attention. I simply went to bed and stayed there. The only things I would let her feed me, when I could eat at all, were boiled potatoes, sweet-potato jam, and tea with saltine crackers. My weight plummeted, as did the muscle I’d worked so hard over the years to build.

One day I heard voices in the patio, Virginia’s and someone else’s, a man. I thought, perhaps, that it was her brother. I feigned sleep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. But then I heard a soft rapping on the shutters of the doorway that led from the bedroom to the patio. I didn’t answer. Whoever it was, knocked a little harder.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Carlos Baamonde, Dan. Can I talk to you?”

“Carlos Baamonde?” I thought. “The vet? What the hell does he want?” Carlos was the veterinarian for our half-dozen cats. Both Virginia and I had a lot of respect for him as a medical professional…for cats. Also as an animal rights activist. I had, in fact, first met him while doing a series of stories on the subject.

“What do you want, Carlos?” I asked the slats of the closed shutter.

“How about letting me in so we can talk?”

Reluctantly, I dragged myself out of bed and unlatched the shutters, then turned and immediately climbed back into bed, propping myself up to a sitting position with some pillows. Carlos was taken aback, I could tell, seeing me looking emaciated and ill, and with skin the color of the Vatican flag.

“¡Dios mío, Dan!” he said. “You look awful!”

“Is that your medical opinion?” I asked sarcastically.

“Virginia’s really worried about you,” he said, “and I see why. You are really quite ill.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Doc,” I said.

“You should really see a doctor,” he said.

“Well, I am seeing one.”

“Who?”

“You, you’re standing right there!”

“I mean a human doctor.”

“You’re human enough.”

“This is serious, Dan.”

“You’re telling me!”

“So you should go to the doctor.”

“Tell me what a doctor would tell me…No, wait! I’ll tell you. No fats, no alcohol. Absolute bed-rest, because the liver is currently like gelatin and can be easily injured. And plenty of liquids. I’m living on saltines and potatoes and drinking tea and apple juice until they come out my ears and I only move from this bed to go to the bathroom.”

“But you should at least find out what type of hepatitis you have, or if it’s something other than hepatitis,” he reasoned.

“It’s not A, because I’ve had it and you can only get it once. I never knew you could get both A and B, but this must be B and the prognosis is the same as with A but takes longer. Hopefully, I’ll survive without permanent liver damage, but if not, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. And if it’s C, all I can say is that I have no idea how I could have contracted it, but if that’s what I have, basically, I’m fucked.”

The vet stood there looking quizzically at me for a moment, and then he said, “I hope you get to feeling better really soon, Dan. Take care.”

And with that he left the room and stepped back out into the patio. Out there I could hear him and Virginia speaking in hushed tones. I overheard him say, “Just let him be. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

I alternated for days on end between sleep and working on a novella I was writing. It was about and old-time lawman and an old-time tough guy in a small Ohio town. I was writing it sitting in bed with a ballpoint pen and a lined six by eight-inch notebook. I couldn’t write for long at a stretch without feeling exhausted. So I wrote in little intervals of half an hour to an hour, back-to-back with hour-long naps. I was in bed for so long that when I finally got well enough to get up, I had written the entire one-hundred-page novella.

When I got up, I was thin and pale and weak. I had to force myself to eat because I wouldn’t have any appetite for several months following my recovery. Once I began regaining my awareness of anything but my long illness, I started realizing the dire straits we were in, I started scouting around for free-lance work and landed the translation to English of a scholarly work on Argentine economic history. It was by a renowned Argentine academician with whom I had served on the Fulbright Scholarship Committee. I had been appointed to the committee while I was general news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald by then-Ambassador of the United States Theodore Gildred, and was later re-appointed to it while I was the paper’s managing editor by US Ambassador Terrence Todman. That was how the author had learned of my reputation as a Spanish to English translator.

We agreed that he would pay me three thousand dollars for the job, which, at that impoverished moment, sounded like a fortune. I got him to spot me a third of the fee up front and then worked day and night to finish the job in a month and collect the rest. Suddenly, we were out of the hole, if just barely. We didn’t know how long we’d have to make that money stretch until I could scare up some more work for hire.

Virginia hadn’t wanted to have this conversation with me. She didn’t know how to broach the subject. But eventually she said, “I think you ought to give your father a chance to help you out.”

Back in the day, as a young reporter
and free-lance correspondent

I gazed at her dumbly. It wasn’t a possibility that had ever entered my head. Having tired of being turned down every time I’d asked Whitie for anything, I had only asked him for help once since I was twelve and had started making all of my own money for everything except the roof over my head and food on the table, whenever I was home for meals, from that age on. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was making as much per week as a lot of breadwinners in my town. And I was seldom home to do anything but give some private percussion lessons in my basement studio, or to sleep a few hours a night.

The only time I’d asked Whitie for a favor since then had been in 1971, while I was in the Army and living in California. It was only the beginning of my second year in service. I was a Spec 4, just married, making one hundred ninety dollars a month and paying rent of a hundred twenty in Los Angeles. Whenever my Army schedule allowed, I gave drum lessons at a local music institute to supplement our income, but the pay was paltry.

We needed a car—everybody needs a car in LA. So naturally—naturally, that is, for most guys I knew, but not really for me—I called Whitie and asked him if he thought maybe he could spot me five hundred bucks until I got out of service or made enough rank to pay him back, so I could buy a used car.

Silence…

“Dad? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Um…you’re catchin’ me at a kind of bad time, Dan. I mean, we’ve got our income tax coming up, and…” he trailed off.

“I’ll pay you back, Dad,” I said. “You know I’m good for it.”

“Here’s an idea,” Whitie offered. “You’ve got that drum set sitting here in our basement collecting dust. I mean, you’re not doing anything with it. If you want me to, I could sell it for you.”

Gretsch tangerine sparkle drums
and Zildjian cymbals - my pride and joy

In my mind, I saw the beautiful tangerine-sparkle Gretsch jazz set with a carefully selected set of hand-made Zildjian cymbals that were my pride and joy after the beaten-up used drums with crappy generic cymbals I had played before I could afford it.

I had to talk around a knot in my throat when I answered. “Well, I’m using the Army’s drums right now,” I said. “But I was thinking it’d be nice if my drums were waiting for me when I got out so I could go right back to playing clubs and teaching…”

“That’s kinda what I’m sayin’,” Whitie said. “You’ll start working right away and can buy new ones.”

“Working with what, Dad?” I said getting ever more exasperated. “If you sell them, I won’t have any goddamn drums to work with!”

“Well…” he paused, sighed a hissing, irritated sigh, and said, “you do whatever the hell you want, Dan. I’m just trying to offer you a solution to your problem.”

“So no loan, then?”

“Nope, can’t do ‘er, Dan. Sorry.”

I hadn’t felt like this since I was twelve and was suddenly reminded of why I had decided back then never to ask him for anything again. Just like when I was twelve, I felt like crying and could barely trust my voice.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, sell my goddamned drums. I don’t give a shit. I need the money.”

Whitie ended up selling a set of drums and cymbals that, at the time, would have cost six hundred dollars new, as “used” for three hundred seventy-five. He proudly wired me the money—proud of his celerity and salesmanship (he could sell anything).

Back then, in Ohio, I could have bought a fairly decent six or seven-year-old vehicle for that money. In LA, I ended up having to settle for a broken-down “vintage” Austin 1100 that nobody wanted and that they were only too glad to have off of the used car lot. I was always grateful when it decided to run. The rest of the time I had my more mechanical Army buddies tinkering with it to get it limping along again.

As I say, I was standing there staring dumbly at Virginia as all of these hurtful old images ran through my head.

“No,” I said finally.

“No what?”

“Hell no!”

“You’re being stubborn. You never give your dad a break. You’re so hard on him.”

“Because I already know what to expect. In short, nothing.”

“I’m asking you to do this. Please! We need help until you can get back on your feet. And you should give your dad a chance to help us, to show he’s not the selfish man you always try to make him out to be.”

General news editor and second to Herald
EditorJames Neilson - times were good

Reluctantly, I decided to acquiesce. Even though it would again mean admitting that I’d failed. After relative success throughout my youth and in my early middle years in the fields of my own choosing, pride and intransigence had placed me in a crisis situation at age forty. It was humiliating to have to run to Daddy. Especially when I felt his response, even if he didn’t express it out loud—which, perhaps, he would—was likely to be, I told you so.

When I was doing well and feeling flush, I had started calling my parents often. My father would talk on the main phone upstairs and my mother would rush down to the basement and converse with me from the downstairs extension. But now I hadn’t called in months. They knew nothing of my illness, or that I’d left my job, or the situation we were in. International calls back then were complicated and very expensive. Our finances were such that I really couldn’t afford to call. So not only was I calling to put the bite on Whitie, but I was also doing it collect!

When the operator asked if he would accept the charges, I heard Whitie say, “Uh…yes…I guess so.”

I tried to sound cheerful and upbeat. Asked them how they’d been. Said I was sorry it’d had been such a long time between calls. Then added, “Oh and sorry about the collect call!”

“Yeah,” said Whitie, “I was wondering…what the hell? Is he in jail, hahaha?”

I heard Reba Mae say, “Norman!” in an admonishing tone.

“That’s kind of what I’m calling about,” I said.

And then I launched into a long and detailed account of the vicissitudes of the past year, my leaving my job, trying new ventures, miscalculating the depth of the Argentine economic crisis, falling ill, losing everything but the house and my VW van, and, in short, of how, after a successful career of more than thirteen years, I now found myself basically penniless.

Along the way, my mother stopped me to ask questions. She was particularly worried about my having had a second bout of hepatitis.

“I didn’t even know that was possible,” she said.

“Me either,” I told her.

“What did the doctor say about your liver?”

“Um, I haven’t been to one.”

That really worried her.

“Don’t fret, Mom,” I said. “I’m okay now. I just have to get back on my feet.”

Whitie was getting antsy. This was all well and good, but it was taking a long time. “Well, Dan,” he said, “we’re gonna let you go now, because this is, you know, long distance, and our phone bill’s gonna look like the national debt…”

Managing Editor, a job from which I planned to retire. But
pride, intransigence and adherence to my journalistic
principles meant that this would be the last photo of
me at the head of the Herald. 

“Just a damned minute, Norm,” Reba Mae said into the extension. “Was there anything else, you wanted to tell us, honey?”

I sighed involuntarily. I felt that lump in my throat again. It was hard to talk. Finally, I said, “I need help. Just till I can get some work and get back on my feet.”

“Of course,” Reba Mae said.

Whitie said, “How much help?”

“I was thinking like maybe…five thousand?”

“Five thousand!”

“Just to tide us over a little bit until I can get going again.”

“Oh hell, Dan!” Whitie said. “I could maybe loan you five hundred for a while, but five thousand!”

“It’ll be a loan, Dad. You can charge me interest until I can pay it back…”

“Yeah, but how do I know you’ll be able to?”

“I guess for once maybe you’ll just have to believe in me and trust me,” I said.

“Well, but…five grand. That’s a lot of trusting, Dan, y’know?”

I felt dirty having this conversation with my father. Especially knowing that he had worked hard, invested wisely, and had plenty of money to live on comfortably for the rest of his life. But it was, after all, his money. He had never had a lot of use for me. Why should he feel obliged to help me?

“Besides,” he went on. “We’ve never done anything like this for your brother and sister, and…”

I stopped him.

“Look, it’s okay,” I said. “Forget I called. I’m really sorry I bothered you with this. You’re right. It’s up to me to get out of this mess. It’s all right. Just forget it.”

“I don’t mind sending you a few hundred, if that’ll help,” he went on, “but it’s not like life isn’t tough for everybody, Dan, and I sure never got any help of the kind you’re asking me for.”

I was thinking, “Yeah, except the business your dad had waiting for you when you got home from service and that you made a good living with for twenty-three years,” but I bit my tongue.

“It’s okay Dad,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

“Well, it’s not like that, Dan,” he said. “All I’m saying is…”

Suddenly, I heard Reba Mae say, “Shut up a minute, Norman!”

Then to me, she said, “Danny, I have more than half that money in my personal savings right now, and your father will come up with the rest. Don’t worry. We’ll send it right away. Always remember that you can come to us. Stuff happens. I want you to feel that we’re always there for you. We love you.”

I felt relief. It was the first time since I was twelve that I didn’t feel like I was walking the high wire with no net below me.

 

…To be continued