I wrote first thing in the morning today. Okay, technically, it was just a Facebook status update. But in that tiny status update, probably only read by a handful of people, about the so-called sacrifices I make daily in order to pursue my passion, there's a lot more brooding between the lines.
In the spirit of trying to finish what I start, I've recently been taking out my memoir-in-progress to work on it again. I think the story still needs to be told. At the very least, it will be shared with my kids.
Here's the first chapter. Maybe it's superstitious to post it here, but I think the most we can ever hope for as creative artists is to 1) have an audience and 2) be taken seriously as an artist.
Okay. Go. (And she tears off the Band-Aid.)
...
Chapter One: Chiaroscuro
“I went to the end in order to return to the
beginning without knowing where I was going trusting eye and hand day by day.”
-Author unknown, a note scribbled on one my father’s index cards
I did not expect to hear from my
father unless he was deathly ill or already a ghost. I wasn’t sure what I would do in either case,
but one thing was certain: we would not speak until then.
I imagined myself going there, to
his smoky sixth-floor walk-up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Just to check on him. I
had musings of surprising him with a puppy or kitten. Maybe a few balloons.
I dreamed of him too. He chased me or leapt out at
me from pure darkness. Stout legs, hairy arms, a bald and shiny head. His face
adorned with a well-trimmed mustache. He usually wore army green camping
shorts, muddied hiking boots. Sometimes he wore blue jeans. He looked fit,
aware and strong. He did not look like someone about to die.
*
August
4, 2003
The Jamaican women at the Kings County morgue were
watching One Life to Live when I arrived to identify the body.
“Turn that down, you,” one of them
said. She wore long hoop earrings and acrylic nails with lightning bolts
painted on them.
A woman in tight jeans muted the TV.
The room was the size of a two-car garage. Shiny
file cabinets were shoved up against exposed brick walls behind a desk on one
side, some of their worn labels now replaced with alphabetized post-it notes.
The air smelled like my 8th grade gym locker room. Wet dogs, sweaty
feet and cooked eggs.
The woman assigned to my case sat at the desk; her
name tag read “Veronica”. Her hair was pulled smoothly into a bun, the earrings
brushing the side of her neck. Save for a black ribbed turtleneck, she gave off
the allure of a gypsy. She struck me as someone who had 'been there, done
that.' Something about this comforted
me.
Pete, by now my husband of a year, sat next to me.
Silent and stoic. He held my hand in his lap.
I sat waiting for Veronica to find my file and
imagined the four walls of the office falling outward, myself and the other two
women exposed on a movie set. This was a place no one ever wanted to go. I
would walk out of here today. My father would not.
What happened to all those people who died with
nobody to claim them? What if I had decided to let someone else take care of
him?
“Do you want a cup of coffee?” Veronica asked
abruptly.
“Sure, that’d be great,” I settled my hands on my
lap.
Veronica gestured to a squat card table near the
door. “Behind you,” she said.
I slid the chair out, causing an awkward screech,
and went over to where three pots were lined up on burners in front of a Bunn
coffee machine. On the other side of the room, the woman in tight jeans now
flipped through a gossip magazine. Her legs were crossed, one foot tapping the
linoleum floor. A television hung above her head like a halo. It looked like it
might easily fall on her, causing this day and this appointment to be cut short
and to enter into another version of tragedy.
I pulled a Styrofoam cup off the table and reached
for the pot of coffee that looked the freshest. I tossed a packet of sugar and
a sleeve of powdered creamer into the cup. The coffee quickly turned the color
of diarrhea.
I sat back down.
“There now, better?” Veronica said. I looked in
her eyes, painted dark with too much eyeliner. Maybe those were fake eyelashes.
“Yes, thanks. It’s been a long morning,” I said,
taking a tentative sip. My hands were
shaking, my fingernail polish chipped, reduced to colorful confetti. I had
chewed off most of the pink lacquer the night before.
The phone rang.
“Just a moment,” Veronica held up one of the
lightning bolts, “I need to take this.”
A list ran through my head. Vital information
about the dead. Hair color. Eye color. Height. Weight. Address. Occupation.
Mundane details, yes. But, they made up a life. In the case of murder or
unexplained death, they might solve a crime or a mystery. I knew I wasn’t the
first person to look for answers here.
Veronica’s voice grew louder as she spoke more
deliberately to the person on the other end of the phone. “I cannot process the
claim if you do not come down to the morgue. That’s what I’m trying to say to
you, ma’am,” she fingered the telephone cord, her lightning bolts taking on a
life of their own.
More vitals. Mother’s date of birth. Father’s date
of birth. Date of death. The words fell in my head and slipped through an
imaginary sidewalk crack.
Next of kin. Where I lived. Just in between the
Next and Kin. I was the of. The line my father must have filled in at some
point, on some form in an office like this, knowing I would be here someday to
deal with this.
Next of kin. I repeated it to myself.
That's why there was no one else. I was the next
of kin.
I didn’t know the man I was claiming. He was a stranger to me, a ghost of someone I
had buried long ago in my child’s heart.
But yesterday, everything had changed.
You have one new message. Message One. Received
Friday, August 3rd, at 1:34 p.m. “Hi, this message is for Meredith
Franco. I, uh, this is Stephen Greene. I am a friend of your father’s. I have
some news for you. If you wouldn’t mind calling me back. It’s pretty urgent.
Call me at home anytime. Thanks.”
When I first heard the message, Stephen’s name
sparked nothing. Stephen had a 718 number. He lived somewhere in Brooklyn.
Two rings. A man with a high-pitched
voice answered the phone.
“Is this Stephen?” I said.
“Yes.” The voice was raspy.
“Stephen, it’s Meredith, Albert
Werder’s daughter.” I said, feeling like an impostor. I hadn't said his name in
a long time.
“Meredith. You don’t remember do
you? I live in your father’s neighborhood.”
I didn’t remember.
He continued, “I met you once when
you were a teenager. You wanted to go to some party downtown and your father
asked me if it was safe. I had just biked over. We were standing outside his
building,” He said this last part with desperation in his voice, like if I
didn't recall these details he had nothing left.
Thankfully the muddied photograph
turned clear. Stephen, Stephen Greene the painter, the guy my father always
secretly thought I’d end up with. He was a few years older than I—enough that
it wasn’t appropriate for us to date when I was sixteen, but my father hoped we
might get together later maybe once I’d moved to Manhattan and finished
college. Stephen, yes Stephen. I had wanted to go to a warehouse techno party. “A rave?” my father had said jovially, “What
a great fucking name for a party!”
Stephen thought Al should accompany
me. So that night, my father took me to the party and made strange air signs
with his arms as the bass pounded us into the floor. We stayed out dancing
until five in the morning. Al took me for pancakes afterwards.
I told Stephen that I remembered
now. I was starting to remember it all.
“You're a pretty tough person to
find,” he cough laughed here. It wasn't a real laugh but the kind you make when
you're just trying to make light of something. To keep it relatively upbeat.
“Sorry about that,” I wasn't sure
how to respond.
“Did your boss tell you I called the
office?”
I told him yes, that I was surprised
he was able to track me down there. The truth? I had erected stronghold after
stronghold during the past years in order to prevent my father from finding me.
Stephen said he had Googled me and
finding my name on a web page that was maintained by my office, he had followed
me to my job as an administrator at Columbia University.
So I had left a breadcrumb. One
footprint in the snow between me and my father. My name, in eight point font at
the bottom of the grants submission web site, had been the difference.
I didn't tell Stephen that my boss
had mentioned his phone call. Instinctively I had known that his call was very
likely about Al being sick or dead, but part of me worried it might be a trap
of sorts. Al had done crazier. The time he sent me a dozen roses to an earlier
job in Manhattan sprung to mind.
It was not out of the realm of
possibility to think he could have asked a friend to call me and scare me a bit
so that I'd finally get in touch with him. After my boss had told me of his
call, I'd stepped outside for my lunch
break. It was raining on Amsterdam Avenue. I stood, umbrellaless, and wondered
how it had gotten to this point. How did
we so easily slip from innocence to the point of no return? From a powdery baby
in her new father's arms, to millions of miles of arms between us?
Back in my apartment, there was an
awkward silence on the phone. Stephen and I both knew he didn’t have pleasant
news and we couldn’t go on reminiscing or chitchatting.
So, he got right to it. My father was dead.
I screamed once, hollowly, like a
distressed animal. Then, I began to cry.
Stephen told me the rest of the
story. The neighbors had complained of a wretched smell and the building
manager, who was also Stephen’s father, asked his son to check up on Al.
“He was supposed to be in Cape Cod for the
weekend,” Stephen kept saying, “He was supposed to be in Cape Cod.”
He thought
nothing of Al’s car parked outside on Hicks Street. My father typically got a
ride to the Cape with friends.
Stephen described the flies (“all those fucking
flies”) and the smell of the body. He said that when he finally opened Al’s
door to discover the worst, he figured the body had been rotting for about four
days. He noticed his feet first. They were hanging out of the bedroom doorway.
It looked as if Al had a heart attack and couldn’t get to the phone. His
medication was scattered on the floor, like he'd attempted to open a pill
bottle.
He repeated, the flies were all over the
apartment—everywhere. Awful. Beyond Description.
He said the cops were holding some
of Al’s belongings at the station. His wallet. His keys.
“They even took his money clip,” Stephen said,
starting to cry, “He loved that money clip. It was the Native American one he
got in Arizona. Man, the police were such fucking assholes. They pulled couch
cushions up to see if there was money underneath them. They took fucking change
from under the couch cushions. Fucking assholes. I was standing right there,
looking at my friend.”
Veronica hung up the phone. “I’m sorry about that.
Shall we?”
I nodded.
“Now, lady. Your father is very bad, very bad. You
know what I mean?” Veronica’s eyes wandered over my head to the clock just
above the door.
“Yes, I know,” I said, “I spoke to
the coroner a few hours ago.”
Veronica leaned closer, her earrings glinting, and
placed a manila envelope in front of me. On its longest edge were printed two
words and an initial.
Werder, Albert D.
So, this is what we become. A
phrase, a few words, a thing to be separated by a comma or some other
appropriate border between the living and the dead.
“I’m gonna show you the photos now, ok? Then, if
you need to, we can look at his body in the other room.”
Veronica opened the envelope with a
long fingernail and pulled out three Polaroids. Quickly, she organized the
photos like a casino dealer in one hand, splayed out like playing cards with
their dark, metallic backs facing me.
“I need to warn you miss, ok? Your
father is badly decomposed.”
I picked a spot on Veronica’s desk and tried to
focus. It was a smudge, maybe from old leftover gum. I picked this spot and I focused, knowing
that if I did not, I would start to cry.
“Badly decomposed. You understand? Yes? No?”
Veronica stared at me—her eyes pleading for a sign of recognition.
I straightened in the hard-backed
chair, “Just so I can prepare myself, what exactly does a decomposed body look
like?”
“Oh, that’s tough, very tough. I’d
say it gets black like fruit. You ever see a rotted peach or plum? It’s dead,
you know? The skin gets black and there’s nothin’ to hold it up so it just
caves in. It just gives out.” With that, Veronica made a flimsy attempt with
her lips to imitate the sound of something giving way – like a balloon losing
air. “Like that, see?”
Deep breath, deep breath.
She explained that dead people
typically grow hair on their faces after just a few hours. My father might look
changed and his facial features could likely be unrecognizable, but she had
seen to it that his face was pulled into a dignified smile. I would be able to
recognize dental features. She thought I might like to know too that the
forehead and hairline are great place markers.
“That’s usually a good place to start. You can
make the identification from there,” she said.
“Don’t forget to look for landmarks,” my father
had whispered in my ear many years ago as he was teaching me how to read maps,
“When you’re lost, they come in handy.”
I nodded and she flipped over the photos.
Then, the rat-like white whiskers on his face, the
strange way he seemed to look happy, not at all defeated in the pitch blackness
of it all. I tried to focus on his
hairline, the dark, rotten balding lines that marked his face and gave it an
outline.
I knew I would never forget these things.
So, I began to cry.
“That’s him, right? I think that’s him,” I said to
no one at all.
I had brought a photo with me. My father, Al,
standing in front of a townhouse in Brooklyn somewhere. He is wearing an army
jacket.
“Yes, that’s him. That’s my father.”
