Daddy Clock: A Novel

I'm telling you, they were amazing tits.

And there I was, ravenously devouring them at the precise moment my mother showed up.

Granted, they were only fantasy tits, attached to the fantasy female starring in my dream.  But when Sophie started shaking my shoulder and whispered, "Chuckie.  Papa wants to see us now," I was one unhappy guy about leaving them.

So okay.  It is not good form to have dirty dreams in the intensive care waiting room when your father might be dying.  The public hard-on potential alone should be enough to deter a guy.  However, given the current status of my sex life, that dream could arguably be the highlight of my fall season.

Daylight had started to creep through the blinds of the waiting room.  The tan vinyl couches and pallid green walls had the look of a bad hangover.  There was a little too much of yesterday left in it.  Yesterday's newspapers, yesterday's coffee cups, and yesterday's occupants, all in assorted modes of pacing or sleeping or staring dourly at the TV.

"Chuckie," my mother nudged, "come ON!"

Christ, I hate being Chuckied.  I am forty-four years old, and my name is Charlie.  Charlie Feldman.  No one gets away with Chuckie-ing me anymore.  No one but the fabulous Sophie.  Who, like all mothers, acknowledges only under duress that I am an adult.  Her preferred vision of me still involves little brown corduroys and cowboy suspenders.

Of course even the most cursory reality check should alert our Sophie to other signs of my being full-grown.  Such as the fact that I am six feet tall (okay, five-eleven), weigh one hundred eighty pounds, and am beginning to gray in a way that I don't exactly pull off as distinguished.  Further proof that I am a certifiable adult is the fact that I have spent nearly twenty years covering sports for the Chicago Sun-Times. Unfortunately the assholes masquerading as editors have refused to give me the column that I, like all sportswriters, feel I deserve.  Even so, I have won some national writing awards, and my byline is not unknown.

Except maybe to Sophie.  Who does know it.  But doesn't read it a lot.  Sophie has a hard time getting into sports.  Abe, on the other hand, the one currently on the respirator and who maybe has seen my byline for the last time, reads every single word.  Twice.  Maybe three times.  The old man can hardly get enough of my dazzling prose.  Part of it is that my younger brother Roger is a podiatrist.  There is not much conversational follow up when you tell people your son is a podiatrist.  But when you tell them your son is a sportswriter, you can have a conversation for days.

Abe and Sophie have been married forty-seven years.  Most of that time was spent behind the counters at Feldman's Children's Shop, formerly of Rogers Park, subsequently of Skokie, currently extinct.  Since then, they have happily divided their time between Florida winters and Chicago summers, causing Abe to marvel, "Who ever thought I'd be living year round in white shoes?"

However, right now Abe was the only person in the room without white shoes.  He was surrounded by three nurses on monitoring duty when Sophie and I pushed open the door.  It was six-thirty a.m. on Sunday, and Sophie and I had been at the hospital since four the afternoon before.  Roger and his wife Elaine had left at ten last night to go home to their three kids.

I hadn't seen the old man since four in the morning, and wished like hell that waxy, gray look he had would go away.  "Dad.  Hey, Dad," I whispered from the foot of the bed, "you're looking great.  How ya doin'?"

Abe looked like he was trying to be doing good.  It wasn't that easy.  I'm sure all he wanted was for it to be the way it was.  The way it was Friday before he collapsed with a massive heart attack.  Or the way it was three years ago when he and Sophie went to Roger's kid's bar mitzvah.  Or the way it was thirty years ago when he and Roger and I would sneak away from the store, take the El down to Wrigley Field, and play hooky for the day.  I bet Abe didn't care which "way it was" he went back to, just so it would be anytime but now.  Now he must be scared shitless.  I was.

There hasn't ever been a whole lot of talk in the Feldman household about dying.  But now, if we got through this part without the dying really happening, we would never be able not to think about it again.  We all knew that.

"Abe-y," whispered Sophie, "it's Chuckie."

"Mom, he knows.  Right, Dad?  She just can't believe that she finally has you where she's always wanted.  With all those tubes down your throat so you can't tell any of those lousy jokes."

Abe almost smiled.  But it was more than he could handle.  His eyes closed immediately.  Sophie and I spent the rest of our allotted five-minute visit standing in a conversation-less holding pattern.  And hoping the next time we'd be allowed in, we'd get a little more of Abe back.

As the morning progressed, the hospital began to take on more of a full Sunday look.  Pre-church and post-church families with straight-from-the-supermarket cellophaned carnations started streaming in.  This group to see their dying father, that group to see their dying grandmother . . . The thing I noticed most was that they all arrived in groups.  Sunday is always a big group day.  When you're alone, you feel Sundays in a tough way.  Tougher even than Saturday nights.  At least Saturday nights are dark.  You can hide.  Or you can hang out with a buddy.  Granted, in my case, I'm usually hanging out with a bunch of guys in face masks at some hockey rink.  Or I have for the last three years.  That's when they took me off baseball, and I started covering the Blackhawks.  But even during the summer when I'm off, Sunday is the day that you notice your oneness the most.  Everybody shows up in some version of a unit.  Nuclear families, extended families, divorced dads with their kids, divorced moms with their kids,
divorced dads with their kids and girlfriends, divorced moms with their kids and boyfriends, straight couples with no kids, gay couples with no kids, and kid couples who you hope like hell are smart enough not to have kids.  Just about every kind of demographic mutation always seems to show up full-force on Sundays.

Except singles.  Single guys, anyway.  Single women get together on Sundays.  But not us guys.  Not guys my age.  No way am I going to call up a guy and say, "Let's get some brunch and watch the game at the bar."  For Chrissakes, I'm forty-four.  My friends aren't available for games.  My friends are married.  Or they are divorced.  But on Sunday they all have some version of family or fatherhood to deal with.

Like Bobby.  Bobby Tuckerman was my best friend all the way through Senn High School.  Then after college, when I came home from Michigan and he came home from Madison, we shared an apartment for two years, until Bobby met Sherry Lowenberg.  Three's a crowd in a one-bedroom apartment.  So I moved out, Sherry moved in, they got married, and now they were the proud owners and operators of Jennifer, Joshua, and Jason Tuckerman, ages seventeen, fourteen, and eight, respectively.

I started out pretty involved with their kids, in an Uncle Charlie way.  But once Bobby and the family went suburban out there in Deerfield, I've been less inclined to show up in their lives.  Bobby and I still talk on the phone regularly, but the one-on-ones with each other have definitely dwindled.  Part of this has to do with the half-hour drive between us and my being out of town so much.  But it's also his wife-driven social schedule, the kids' gymnastics tournaments, and soccer coaching.  It isn't that I begrudge Bobby any of this, but it does make it tough to relate.  Tough to connect to this parenthood club that he and most everybody else seems to belong to.  But me.

Christ.  I hate how that sounds.  I hate guys who gripe.  It makes me seem like some mope vying for a spot in the Lonely Guy Hall of Fame.  But waiting rooms do not bring out the best in a person.  They make a person think all sorts of who-is-going-to-be-sitting-in-the-waiting-room-for-me thoughts.  It's a little tough not to notice that you are careening toward fifty and seem to be the only son in the room who hasn't had the opportunity to be a fine father too.

Watching the the couple across from me clinging fiercely to each other made me feel as if I were at a drive-in movie all by myself.  How hard was it to fall in love with a person, make a kid with that person, stay in love with that person, have fights with that person, raise your mutual kid with that person?  How hard was it to stop living in chronic float?

I was still waiting for it to happen.  The wife, kids, two-car garage life.  Not that I had been doing much to make it happen these past five years, with hockey keeping me on the road nine months of the year . . .

Dammit.  I am not going to blame it all on the job.  This job was always the dream.
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