I called my mom and Liz to tell them. It was pretty hard telling my mother
that her husband was dead. Liz took it the worst. I heard my mom on the
other end of the phone tell Liz to sit down. A few moments later, I heard
Liz scream.
Liz and my mom drove back later that day from North Carolina. That night all
three of us slept in my parents’ bed. Liz and I were concerned that it would
be too much for my mom to handle losing her husband and suddenly be alone in
their bedroom, but she seemed to handle it pretty well. But you could never
really tell how anyone was handling anything in this house.
The summer of 1982. That disgusting, sticky, humid weather where your back
soaks through your shirt just from taking a short drive. By midsummer,
everything was a mess. My sister Liz’s boyfriend flipped out in our kitchen
one night and attacked me with a butcher’s knife.
Soon after, Liz tried to kill herself for the first of many times. Swallowed a
bunch of pills. Her heart stopped the moment we got her to the hospital, but
they were able to revive her.
Pretty soon after that, Liz and my mom went out of town to visit relatives and
I found my father’s dead body lying there sideways on my parents’ bed, fully
dressed in his usual shirt and tie, with his feet almost on the floor, like
he just sat down to die at 51. I tried to learn CPR from the 911 operator on
the phone, carrying my father’s already stiff body across the bedroom floor.
It was weird touching him. That was the first time we had any physical
contact that I could remember, other than the occasional cigarette burn on
my arm while squeezing by him in the hallway.
At the end of the summer, which I had already started referring to as The
Summer of Love, I drove my gold ’71 Chevy Nova away from home for the first
time.
I had bought the car that I called Old Gold, complete with a stop sign used in
place of its rusted out floorboard, for a hundred bucks from my hot blonde
cousin Jennifer, who years later would die on the plane that hit the
Pentagon, September 11, 2001. She was a flight attendant. Sent a postcard
from Dulles airport that morning that read: “Ain’t Life Grand?” in big
letters on the front.
Back in the Summer of Love, I had just answered the kitchen phone. It was
Liz’s boyfriend, Robert, calling for her. After I called upstairs for Liz to
pick up the phone, I heard my mom knock on Liz’s bedroom door. Then she
knocked on the bathroom door. When nobody answered, she
“On the bathroom floor,” my mom says. I dropped the phone and ran up the
stairs, shouting, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?!”
I found Liz, indeed, asleep on the blue-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor,
having just ingested a bottle of pills, the empty bottle lying on the floor
next to her with the lid nearby. I yelled at her to wake up, slapped her
face, peeled her eyes open, yelled again, right up against her ear. Nothing.
I ordered my mom to call an ambulance.
The paramedics came quickly and ran up the stairs to try all the same stuff I
had already tried. I don’t know where I learnt all that stuff. Must have
been from watching TV. They carried her downstairs and laid her on the
carpet by the front door, ripped her shirt off and tried to revive her some
more. The neighbours were all starting to gather on the front porch, looking
through the window, trying to see what was going on. A paramedic wheeled in
a stretcher and they lifted Liz onto it. Me and my mom got in her car and
followed the ambulance to the hospital.
As we entered the emergency room, I saw my friend Anthony sitting there,
coincidentally, waiting for poison oak treatment. “Is that Liz?” he asked,
looking at the unconscious blonde woman being wheeled by on a stretcher.
“Yeah,” I said. As they wheeled her into the emergency room, her heart
stopped. They went into “code blue” mode, or whatever you call it, and
started to resuscitate her. Amazingly, they revived her. One minute later
and she would have died.
Liz came home from hospital. She and my mom went to visit our cousins in North
Carolina. One night I was doing the dishes and my dad came into the kitchen
and struck up a rare conversation.
“ You’re doing the dishes?” he asked incredulously.
“Yeah, someone’s gotta do them,” I answered.
“Oh, you’re a redneck now, I forgot,” he said.
I had recently started doing an old country music radio show with a friend of
mine, Ed, every Sunday night. We played lots of blue-grass records, and
Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, that sort of stuff.
We joked around a little and I remember thinking that it was the most human,
real conversation I’d ever had with him. He even told me a joke. An hour
later I went out to meet my friends Anthony and Sean to go eat Mexican food.
As I walked out the front door, I thought I saw something strange in my
peripheral vision: my father lying on the couch as he always did after
watching the news, but backwards – with his feet where his head usually was
– which would have been highly unusual. But I was late and, as I hurried out
of the door, I decided that I must have imagined it and kept going.
I came home a few hours later and my dad had gone to bed. I sat in the living
room and watched a Saturday Night Live rerun with Charles Grodin hosting. I
laughed out loud during his Art Garfunkel impersonation. Then I went
downstairs to bed. I woke up early the next morning, so I could make the
two-hour drive to register for fall classes in Richmond, but something
didn’t seem right. I don’t know how I knew, but I could tell something was
wrong.
I went upstairs and the usual signs of my father going to work were not there.
No lights were on and it was eerily quiet. I ran up to my parents’ bedroom,
trying to mentally prepare myself for the worst-case scenario. As I walked
in the room, I saw what I was afraid I would see: my father, lying there
face-up on the bed, sideways, fully clothed, on top of the covers with his
legs bent and his feet almost on the floor.
I thought maybe he fell asleep like that.
I said, “Dad? Are you awake?” He didn’t respond. I started to panic.
I yelled, “Dad! Wake up! Come on!” I shook him. “Shit! Come on!” I yelled
right up against his ear, the same way I did with Liz. Just the fact that I
was touching him was surreal. I grabbed the phone and dialled 911. When the
operator answered I told her that my father wouldn’t wake up. She asked
where he was, and I told her on the bed. She told me to pick him up and
carry him to the floor so she could instruct me in CPR. I put the phone
down, pushed my arms under his body and picked him up. His entire body was
completely stiff, like a board. I carefully carried him across the room, his
body frozen in the position that he’d been in on the bed, and lowered him to
the floor. I put the phone back to my ear and told the 911 operator that his
body was stiff and asked her what to do next. She said, “Oh . .. well. . .
um. Just wait there. Someone will be there soon.”
As she finished the sentence, I heard sirens blaring in the distance. He must
have died the night before. The 911 operator knew there was nothing to do
after I told her his body was stiff. The ambulance came and they checked him
out. They put a sheet over him and told me to go downstairs. He was only 51.
I was in shock and didn’t know what to do. It was hard to know even how to
feel. My father had just died, but I barely had a relationship with him. And
here I was, alone with him in the house, just the two of us. Only, he was
dead.
A police officer stood against the wall behind me while I sat at the
dining-room table and flipped through a copy of Newsweek, crying.
The worst part of it all was watching them put my father in a black bag, zip
it up and carry him out through the front door inside it. They didn’t put
him on a stretcher. They just carried out this black bag, sagging like a
sack of trash. I’ve never been able to shake the images of my father walking
into his house one night and then being carried out in a black bag the next
day.
© Mark Oliver Everett 2008. Extracted from Things the Grandchildren Should
Know, to be published by Little, Brown on January 24 at £14.99. Available at
the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165
8585
