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Authors: Mark Richard Zubro

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BOOK: Rust On the Razor
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“Biff and the lawyers have been handling all the calls from the talk shows. They've been negotiating.” Biff was Scott's agent. “This morning Biff said he thought a couple of them were in the final stages of agreement. I told him it was okay to give them the new number. I think I want to do this one, and I'd like you to be there with me.”
“Okay,” I said. Normally, I'd have been thrilled out of my mind to be on
Nightline,
but under these circumstances I wasn't sure how excited I was.
The phone rang again.
“If it's the President, I'm busy,” Scott said. He leaned back and shut his eyes.
I picked up the phone, said hello, listened for a few seconds, and then said, “I'm sorry, he's busy.”
I dodged before Scott could whack me upside the head. It was my oldest brother calling to get an update on the latest happenings. My parents, brothers, and sister had all called saying they would do anything they could to help. I spoke with my brother for a few minutes. Told him the
Nightline
gig was pretty likely. I hung up and a second later the phone rang again.
“Throw the damn thing across the room,” Scott said.
I listened for a moment to the soft-voiced drawl at the other end of the line.
I tapped Scott with the phone. “It's your mom. I think something's wrong.”
He sat up and took the phone. “Mama?”
He listened for several minutes. “When? … Is Nathan or Mary there? … I'm on my way … . Don't worry … . I love you.” He hung up.
“What's wrong?”
“Mama was calling from the hospital. Daddy's had a heart attack. They don't know if he's going to live. I have to go home.”
“What can I do?”
He hesitated. “Will you come with? I'll need you. If the worst happens or if he gets better, I'd like you to be there.”
“Of course I'll come with.”
Beastly hot and ghastly humid midwestern summers had never driven me mad with desire to go someplace even more hot and humid. It was mid-June, and we were heading for Georgia and possibly a funeral. Losing a parent, no matter how old you were or what other stresses
you're under, takes total precedence in one's life and emotions. Ted Koppel and a budding career on the talk-show circuit could wait. Scott had asked me to come with. He needed me. I would go with him.
I made the calls for plane reservations to Atlanta. From there, we had to hire a private service to fly us to Macon, then rent a car for the two-hour drive east to Scott's parents' house.
As we packed, he filled me in on details. “Daddy went out to check the fence along the west side of our farm early this morning. When he didn't come back by ten, Mama got worried. After she found him, she called a neighbor and they brought him to the hospital.”
“They didn't call the paramedics?”
“Why wait for them to drive out from town and then drive back? They're pretty far out.”
We couldn't get a flight until four. A flurry of phone calls to his brothers and sisters, a few of whom he managed to get hold of, were followed by cancellation of engagements. Since it was the baseball season, his schedule of outside appearances was relatively light. He only needed to drop out of a celebrity golf tournament.
I was already on summer vacation, so I didn't have to worry about work. I called several friends to cancel dinners, a play, and a movie. When Scott is out of town with the team, I catch up with friends. I'd planned to take all of my nephews and nieces to a game to watch Scott pitch. My
mother promised to make all the calls to my siblings to explain. “Is there anything else I can do?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“It's going to be tough on Scott.”
“I know.”
“Tell him I care. I love you, Tom. Be careful.”
Is there a mom somewhere on the planet who doesn't tell her kid to be careful when he's leaving on a trip?
Just before we left for the airport, around two, Scott checked with the hospital. No change in his father's condition.
The drive out to O'Hare was done by a mad cabby who didn't seem to be bothered by all the construction, but at the airport every clerk seemed to be working at the slowest possible speed. I'd managed to get first-class seats, and once we were settled on the plane, I immersed myself in Barb D'Amato's most recent Cat Marsala mystery,
Hard Christmas.
Scott drummed his fingers, squirmed in his seat, fussed with the earphones, tried to read a book, and read the safety precautions several times. His anxiety did not make the minutes go by any faster.
Somewhere over Tennessee I put my hand on his and said, “We'll do what we can.”
“I wish I could do more.”
“I know. We'll be there soon.”
He sighed. “I barely remember when Grandma and Grandpa died. I was little, and there hasn't been a death in the family since.”
“Who was at the hospital today?”
“Mama and Shannon and Nathan. I wanted to get down there, not talk, although now I wish I'd spoken with Mary.” Scott and Mary are the two oldest children. He has two younger brothers and one younger sister. All of them are married except Scott and his younger sister. He also has a mass of nephews and nieces, many of whom he hasn't met
because of his refusal to return home, but he keeps a special calendar with all their birthdays on it and always sends them gifts. None gets returned but he only gets thank-you notes from Mary's kids. I mentioned to him once that he might think about cutting off the ones who didn't send notes. He said, “I blame the parents, not the kids.”
“How do you think they'll respond at a time like this?”
“Mary will be supportive. I don't know about the rest of them. I hope they forget our differences and want to concentrate on helping Daddy and Mama.”
I like Mary a lot. She and Scott are very close.
“Headlines like this week's won't help. I don't know how much any of them ever really discussed my sexual orientation. Mary said Mama and Daddy never brought it up. She tried to talk to Hiram once, but he refused to discuss it.”
The difference in the acceptance of our sexuality between my family and his had been made more glaring by my family's eager reception of him and the near-total silence from his. Several years ago Hiram, the brother next closest to Scott in age, had written him a letter saying he never wanted to hear from Scott again.
As we neared Atlanta, I watched a huge thunderhead off to the west. Jagged edges of lightning flashed in the distance. “I hope we don't land in that,” I said.
He cast a farm boy's eye on it. “I don't think it'll hit for a while,” he said.
We landed in sunlight, but by the time we emerged with our baggage, black clouds and bright lightning covered half of the western horizon. I wasn't too keen on the idea of trying to outrace a storm. Luckily, our charter pilot told us that all small craft had been grounded.
I suggested we rent a car. While I filled out forms and played with plastic, Scott called the hospital. There was still no change.
When we stepped outside the airport and into the
humidity, I almost gasped. My shirt immediately clung to my body. This was cloying, clinging dampness that made walking torturous as your clothes tried to stick to every inch of your skin. I'd served in the Marines in Vietnam, and the memory of that burst back into my awareness as we strode through the humid air.
We threw our stuff in the trunk. The first thing I did after I started the car was figure out the air-conditioning. I set it to winter, and in a few minutes the atmosphere in the car approached bearable. The clock in the dashboard actually worked. It was just after eight, and I reset my watch. The vehicle had only twenty miles showing on the odometer. The new-car smell was almost pleasant.
By the time we left the parking lot, the sun had set. The wind was up, and a few minutes after we cleared I-675 on our way south, lightning flashed in the night sky, wind buffeted the car, and fat drops of rain splattered randomly on the windshield.
“Gonna really come down,” Scott said.
“At least it'll cool off,” I said.
Always cooler after a rain? Wrong again, midwestern boy.
An hour south of Atlanta the rain swept down in torrents for fifteen minutes. An announcer on a Macon radio station told us this bit of downpour would barely dent the drought they were having and was too localized to do the farmers much good. What I saw out the window sure looked like the deluge to me.
During the rain our speed barely rose above forty. We passed through Henry, Butts, and Monroe counties.
Moments after the downpour stopped, I pointed to a salacious advertisement emblazoned on a huge sign on the left side of the road. “Did I just see a scantily clad, full-breasted woman on that billboard announcing ‘Adult Delights'?”
“Myrtle's Exotic Café. Been there since I was a kid.”
“A billboard like that on the interstate in Georgia? I thought this was the haven of fundamentalism and purity.”
“It's heterosexual, so it's okay.”
“You're kidding?”
He wasn't.
I lowered my window to enjoy the cool breeze.
“What are you doing?” Scott asked.
Clinging humidity fought with the car's air-conditioning. “I was going to enjoy the after-storm coolness.”
“Not here.”
I waved my arm outside the window. I half expected it to move air. I rolled the window up.
“How did you survive summers here?”
“Same way you survived bitter cold Januarys as a kid. We enjoy the mild winters and endure the heat in summer. When you're young, you don't notice so much. Now we turn on air-conditioning. In winter you turn on heaters. Same principle.”
“Sort of.”
We took the first exit south of Macon and turned east. One of those rental-sign deals with movable letters greeted us at the bottom of the exit. Brighter than the lightning had been, the sign announced: “Jesus Saves—Garage Sale Saturday.” A plethora of signs lined the road. A few had bright smiling Georgia peaches; several advertised Vidalia onions; and one hawked something called orange-blossom honey. Assumedly honey made from or with orange blossoms? I asked Scott.
“I always thought it meant honey made from bees that were only allowed to feed on orange blossoms.”
“They can do that?”
He shrugged.
We ate at a nearly deserted Shoney's a quarter of a mile from the interstate. The friendly waitress did not recognize
Scott. I hadn't said anything on the way down, but I was worried about the recognition issue. We were gay men in rural Georgia, and while I didn't think the Ku Klux Klan would come riding through the night to lynch us, I wasn't all that sure. I'd heard enough horror stories about the religious right and the rural South to make me uncomfortable. The newspaper machine next to the front door of the restaurant had a copy of the
Bibb County Gazette
—“Your Weekly Newspaper.” Under a picture of Scott throwing a baseball, the headline read: “Local Sports Star Gay.” The photo showed him standing on a baseball mound against a background of high-school bleachers.
After our meal, we drove in darkness with lightning flashing off to our left and far to the north. Trees rose on both sides of us. Unlike the Midwest, where you can see lights in the distance and feel the spaciousness around you when driving through the countryside at night, here the sides of the road were close and impenetrable. Lights shone only in lonely homes located near the road. Through every small town we traversed, I scrupulously observed the speed limit.
I wanted to keep Scott's mind off his father somehow, but I didn't want to fill the night with endless chatter. What was the point? I just hoped we found Scott's father alive.
“Lots of historical markers around,” I opined after we'd taken ten minutes to pass through the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit of a county seat.
“Sherman marched through here during the War of Northern Aggression.”
“The what?”
“That's what my history teacher called it in high school. She never permitted anyone to call it anything but that in her presence.”
“The Civil War?”
“Yeah. Each marker gives details about what troops of
what division and what battalion stayed next to what creek and what hill.”
“They want to remember Sherman's march?”
“They want to preserve every fact of anything historical. Winning and losing is another matter.”
“Oh.”
We journeyed through Bibb, Twiggs, Wilkinson, Washington, and finally into Burr County. I pointed out the Burr County sign to Scott. “They named a place after a famous American traitor?”
“This is Angus Burr, a hero of the American Revolution. Did something noble in saving people from the English someplace on the coast that was not Savannah.”
Several miles of silence ensued.
We finally entered the city of Brinard, the county seat and the population center nearest to his parents' farm. A huge banner was draped from the Rexall drugstore to the courthouse welcoming all the returning grads of Jefferson Davis High School. I slowed down, and Scott gave directions to the hospital. On first sight the notable buildings in town were a Waffle House and the undoubtedly equally exotic Huddle House, both of which seemed to be your traditional greasy spoons, while the more modern variety was well represented by McDonald's, Burger King, and Subway. It was well after midnight, and we didn't see anyone in the town. Not a car moving through the flashing stoplights. No one tooling around the courthouse square.
The hospital surprised me. It was a four-story, modern edifice. A lit sign proclaimed the emergency-room entrance. Light from round globes shone on dusty pavement. Insects sang and owls hooted as we hurried in.
“Only hospital for miles around,” Scott said as we swung open the doors.
The reception desk was closed. We followed corridors of red brick and yellow tile to the emergency room for
directions. A lone nurse sat filling out forms. As we approached, she looked up from her paperwork.
When Scott gave his dad's name, her whole expression changed, but she made no comment. She merely gave us directions, but I saw her reach for the phone as the elevator doors closed behind us.
Scott's dad was in the cardiac care unit. Upstairs we followed the directions on posted signs to the CCU patient/ family lounge, where Scott used a phone to call the actual unit. No one answered. Scott didn't hesitate: he strode purposefully through the doors to the unit. I followed.
None of the nurses was on duty. Most of the rooms were empty. In one cubicle an elderly woman slept peacefully. Outside the last room on the left we saw a sign with “Mr. Carpenter” typed neatly on it.
We entered the room tentatively. Light from the machines hooked up to Scott's dad cast their blue and green light. I saw blips and heard occasional beeps. One machine read out numbers in red numerals that fluctuated between the high sixties and the low seventies. A tube entered one of his father's nostrils; wires were attached to his chest; and an IV ran to his wrist.
BOOK: Rust On the Razor
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