PoKo

August 9^th 1995 9:00 PM

I’m exhausted and my feet are bruised and cut. When my dad gets home I’ll ask him where he went when he died. Oh yeah, he’s not coming home. Why do my feet sting? I wonder if he was floating above us, I’ll ask him. I can’t. Damn this is hard to process. My feet are on fire. What did I do to them? I wonder when he’ll feel like talking about what he saw. Fuck HE’s NOT COMING HOME. I’ve got to get ice for my feet.

August 9^th 1995 2:00 AM

I’m in my room playing a Smashing Pumpkins cd on a large stereo system cranked to ten. I’ve played music almost every day of my life. It’s been two weeks to the day since my twenty first birthday. My dad lets himself into my room because I can’t hear him knocking. He works second shift at NASA repairing air conditioners. He’s in his dirty work shirt. His face looks like gray suede. He seems sad.

“Why don’t you go in the living room and watch a movie with your mom?”

“I’m ok. I’ll turn it down. I’m probably going to bed soon.”

I get up to turn the music down and he closes the door. I putter around my room for a few more hours then lay down for sleep.

August 9^th 1995 6:09 AM

Everything is black. There is nothing, until there is something. A faint sound. It gets louder and clearer. I ride this sonic bubble up as it increases in size. It lifts me to the surface where there is light. I open my eyes. The sound is screaming.

Violent.

Bloody.

Screaming.

It’s my mom. She’s screaming my father’s name “Jerry” at the top of her lungs. At once I am standing with my heart in my throat. I also hear skin slapping against skin. I think to myself, “She’s being attacked. She’s calling to my dad but he’s asleep. I’ll try to wake him.” I yell “DAD, DAD” as loud as my dry just slept in mouth will allow. I hear the pounding of feet. Someone is running towards my bedroom door. It’s my mom. She got away! I’ll grab her and we’ll jump out of the window to safety. We’ll run to the neighbor’s house. There’s a slam on my door. I open it and it’s my mom. We grab each other by the forearm. I try to pull her into my room as she tries to pull me out.

“C’mon!” I squeak.

“It’s your father”!

I let her pull me out.

We run down the hall towards the living room. We pass the front door. There is a rifle laying caddy corner across the thresh hold.

“Did he shoot himself?” I wonder.

We enter the living room. My father is laying spread eagle on the floor in nothing but underwear with his armpit pressed against the edge of the sofa.

I fall down beside him and say “dad” as I touch his shoulder. I am looking into his eyes and he appears to be looking into mine but then his eyes roll back in opposite directions. His jaw is clenched tight. He is humming. His chest is red where my mother had been pounding on it.

“Call 911,” yells my mom.

I run back into the kitchen where the phone hangs on the wall. I dial. A woman answers.

“911 what is your emergency?”

“My dad… he’s I don’t know. He’s on the floor. Dead maybe.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Yeah I guess. He’s making a noise”

“Who is that screaming in the background?”

“My mother.”

“An ambulance is on the way. “

I hang up. I walk back through the living room door just a few feet away. My father is still in the same spot but now he’s up on his elbow.

“Take it easy on me Myra,” he says to my mom.

“NO. NO. NO. Something is wrong,” my mom screams as she’s holding his face.

“It’s just a panic attack.”

“This IS NOT a panic attack,” my mother cries. “Paul, go flag down the ambulance!”

I run to the front door and step over the rifle. I open the door and at the end of a sunbeam I see a large white possum at the bottom of a tree just 20 feet from the front door. It has a red spot on it’s side.

We live in a beautiful house on three acres of land in the woods. My father purchased the land at the end of the street I was born on from two farmers who fought in the First World War. He built the L shaped house with his own hands and with the help of his brothers. It took almost 2 years.

I could never build a house.

Barefoot I run to the end of our gravel driveway. It’s about 1000 feet long. I hear the sirens around the corner. I see the ambulance. I wave them towards our house in the woods. They pass me. I run behind them in the dust.

When I get back inside my father has wormed his way to the middle of the floor. He swears that it’s a panic attack. He asks for his pills. My mom is putting a Xanax in his mouth but he can’t swallow. I bend down and touch him. His body feels ice cold. I grab a pink fuzzy blanket from the sofa and lay it over him. He tells me he’s burning up.

The EMT’s are behind me. They are very casual. They are in no hurry.

“What’s the problem Mr. Ketterman?” an EMT asks with a sarcastic tone.

“My heart stopped. It isn’t beating”

“Well Mr. Ketterman, if your heart wasn’t beating you’d know it.”

The EMT’s crack open their boxes of equipment and pull Velcro and pop latex gloves.

“I’m dying. Hold my hand,” my dad says to me.

“You’re not dying. They’re going to take you to the hospital and fix you.”

I held his cold hand against the brown shag carpet for 10 seconds. Then I thought I had better get dressed for a trip to the hospital. I stood up and pulled the unswallowed pill from his sticky tongue. I went into my room and put on a Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream t-shirt and shoes. I grabbed my camera from my closet shelf and prepared to take pictures. I was a photography major and these will be good shots. I put the camera back down with maybe an ounce of maturity and think, ”I probably shouldn’t. “

I walk back into the living room in time to see a female EMT put a stethoscope to my father’s chest. She looks up at her coworkers with big eyes and says, “CODE BLUE!”

They explode into action pulling the pink blanket away. Grabbing at him. Tearing packages open. Shouting codes. My mother screams and reaches for him. A big guy grabs her around her waist and pivots her out of the room. They are lifting him onto a gurney. They roll him towards the door. I run past them and go out first. I stand in the sunbeam next to the dewy possum. As they are carrying my father on a gurney down the brick steps that he built, foggy oxygen mask on his face, EKG leads on his chest, he waves at me.

They put him into the ambulance.

He never makes it out of the driveway.

August 9^th 1995 9:02 PM

“Oh I ran down the driveway this morning with no shoes on. That’s why my feet hurt. I wonder if he was looking down on us. It seems like he was. Maybe he saw the treetops when they took him outside. I’ll ask him.”

A classmate from high school contacted me on facebook asking for my help, so…

This morning I had a profound dream. I dreamt that I was walking through Macys on 34th. Huge and labyrinthian and I was holding a beautiful goldfish In my hands that was squirming and thrashing around. And I cared so much about it. I didn’t want it to get hurt and I was looking everywhere for water. The fish was knocking it’s scales off and it was losing it’s shine. The dream was really long but I finally found an aquarium and dropped him in and he took off. I immediately woke up and said out loud ” the fish is the struggle”

I feel unusually positive as of right now.

I was putting the key into the deadbolt of my front door when I thought, “I’ll have to ask my dad what it was like to die”.  It struck me in an instant that this would not be possible since he was in fact dead. At once the feeling of realization was cold and electrical. If you could see the pattern of fright and pain in my body it might look like leafless tree branches.  But I thought it again, “I wonder what he was seeing, I’ll ask him”. Another surge.  My brain could not comprehend his death. We spoke this morning. He asked me to hold his hand. I said, I’ll be right back”, and put my shoes on and brushed my teeth instead.  I knew we’d be taking a trip to the hospital and I didn’t feel prepared. This was after all his second heart attack. But now he didn’t exist. The last time I saw him he laid on his arched back, tubes hanging from his mouth, a sheet draped up to his neck. The sheet was much wider than him, I could tell his chest lay open wide. Two flaps of meat under there. They were hiding it from my mother and I. She said, ”Say something to him, his spirit might be in the room”. I lost it. Crying through the words “I wish I had been a better son”.  His eyes were dull and dry. That’s the life leaving they talk about.  It’s just dry eyes.