THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR -- episode 26

Going to college 1964-1968

Summer 1967

June 8, 1967

Went to see Dad tonight. I don’t want to go again. He hasn’t been eating much. His head is propped on his skinny wrinkled neck like a skull. Sunken cheeks, lips pulled over his teeth. His nose looks like the beak of a hawk. Huge bulging eyes. He needs a haircut and the rest of his body looks like a plucked chicken. His right arm is the same thickness from shoulder to wrist except where the elbow bones stick out.

He said just about nothing and he watched television the whole time. “Wild, Wild West.” Mom said he’s been like that—uncommunicative, in his own sort of world—for several days. For a week he has been sitting in a wheel chair an hour or so each day.

I’m a lifeguard at the town swimming pool. I wanted life at the pool to be the vibrant foreground of Dave’s Summer of 1967, but I guess anything was destined to be only a pale backdrop to Dave’s Despairing Dilemma: 

A letter from Carolyn—

Well, the time has come. I’m getting that senior year future fright. I’m sorry that you are involved, but how could you not be? So this is it. I love you, I really do. I was going to come home in August, just because we have gotten so far apart, but it would just be the same shitting around, unless you are willing to change things. What is going to happen? This can’t go on for ten more years or until I leave the country or something. I’m trying to fall in love with Dick but I don’t think it will work. So please tell me how things look. Are you still determined to remain uninvolved and all that? I’m dead serious—if there is no possible happy future for us together, I don’t want to see you or hear from you anymore. If it is necessary, this summer seems the best time to end our life together. I’m having a ball in Boston, and Dick is around to get me out of the crisis period. Please be fair about this. I know that you don’t want to lose me totally, but if you don’t think that you’ll ever want me totally, give me a chance to get out now. 

I want it straight this time, so try to use a little consideration just this once….

Howdy comes home from summer school for the weekend and I show him the letter. I’ve shown it to Mom and Jane. Howdy thinks I’m trying to talk myself into marrying Carolyn when I really don’t want to and Mom and Jane think I’m trying to talk myself out of it when I really love her. 

I don’t know what I think.

June 27, 1967

It’s 11:00 p.m. Dad has been dead for seventeen hours and fifteen minutes. At seven this morning the hospital called for us to come in. He had “taken a turn for the worse.” When we got there, they told us he had died before they called. The body heat hadn’t left him and he was lying as though he was sleeping. The nurse had gone in at 6:30 and said that he looked bad. At 6:45 another nurse went in and he was dead. After having lost about eighty-five pounds, after the pain he’d gone through, he looked over seventy years old instead of fifty-one. One of the nurses thought Mom was his daughter. 

Yesterday Jane and Mom and John went to see him. He looked distant, Jane said, and he complained of pains in his chest that felt like all the blood had run from his head. Mom told him she hoped he’d get well enough to let her go back to work and he said, “You’ll go back to work, don’t worry.” 

As Mom put it, “Janusz solved everything for everybody.”

Telephone calls all morning, a visit to St. Vincent and the cemetery plot, arrangements with the funeral home, visitors all evening. Mom hasn’t broken down. She has sobbed and held it in with the help of Jane’s tranquilizers.

And now it’s all over. For Mom I guess it won’t ever end. For me, it’s just the physical end of something that had ended long ago—perhaps something that had never started. I can’t feel sorry. I can feel only relief.

Jane and Mom and I go to the Kozak Funeral Home “to okay his work.” There’s a “Kozak Funeral Home” marquee out front. 

I decide not to say, “Now playing: Jack Downs.” 

Mr. Kozak takes us to the viewing room. Jane and I stay at the door and Mom straightens her spine and adjusts her purse in her right hand and walks with Kozak to the casket. He steps aside and she moans and buckles a bit and starts to sob and sinks onto the kneeler. She’s saying something to the body.

Jane goes to her and holds her and talks to her.

I come forward. They’ve dyed his hair and his eyebrows black and they put pink blush on his cheeks and red on his lips. He looks like Bela Lugosi. 

I thank Kozak and he tells us to stay as long as we like and he leaves.

For the evening visitation hours I stand at the head of the casket, a pained look on my face, a quiet strain in my voice. Cousins offer me their deepest sympathies and marvel at how much I’ve grown since I was ten. At the other end of the casket Mom holds up as occasionally her voice gets thin and she chokes out a sob or two. Aunt Helen, clutching her purse against her stomach, scuttles up. She looks at Dad, then at me, back to Dad, and to me she says, “You look more like him now than you ever did,” and she scuttles back to Uncle Joe and his friends.

June 30, 1967

Dad was buried today and all the relatives came to our house for a fête afterwards. There was food and drink and small talk about the new interstate that will by-pass Johnstown and did you hear about the three hundred pound Go-Go dancer from Mount Pleasant?

I’m sitting at Carlson’s on the highway with Susie Givens, one of our Hill Crowd star chamber friends. She’s telling me about Mrs. Crawford and Carolyn, who’s home.

“All that Alcie Crawford can talk about, besides how much she simply loves Dick”—she anticipates me—“skip it, we’ve all made that joke. All she talks about is the eleven bathrooms in Dick’s house. And, oh yeah, how much more Carolyn loves Dick than she ever loved you.”

“Can I make the joke now?”

*****

“So what are you and I going to do?” Carolyn says. “About us.”

We’re sitting on either end of the living room sofa. Her parents are out. 

“I don’t know what I feel about the whole—”

“No bullshit, no evasion. I’m not going to be tortured for the rest of my life.”

I’m looking at the carpet. 

“I told Mother I will never love anyone as much as I love you and I know you love me, too, but there’s nothing left.”

I tell her what Susie told me. 

She goes pale. 

“That’s it. Mother and I are having it out and then I will have nothing more to do with her.”

Next morning I’m awakened by the phone. What time is it? Where are Mom and Jane? I pop open the bedroom door and go to the phone.

“Hello?”

“David, this is Carolyn’s mother.”

Oh, Jesus.

“Carolyn just told me what Susie said to you and I must talk with you. She’s furious with me and she may never forgive me.”

She talks and she ends with tears. I think they’re real. 

“I must go now. Good-bye.”

Carolyn and I meet at the Laurel Lounge on route 30 and she says, “If we’re going to make this final, let’s make it final.”

And so we do.

August 29, 1967

It was the last opportunity for me to do something kind for her. Maybe one day she’ll realize.

August 30, 1967

Little by little Jack Downs is being erased from the world. Already his place, left open by his death, grows crowded out by the rest of life. Most of his tools have gone to brothers-in-law and nephews. His son John has taken his camera. His self-help books will be sold as will be his car. Soon all that will remain will be a few newspaper clippings, some photographs, and Emma’s enduring love.

A letter from Big Brother John Fergus:

…I still think you should bag going to Michigan to teach for J. J. Duq….You just have one hell of too much genius to be the essence of Arête for a group of lonely teeny-bopping, sex-starved, idolatrous females. David Downs the demi-god. It’s not bad to be king in your world but you’ve had three years—one to go—of that already and I don’t think you’re satisfied. So get off your ass and go onto the stage—I’ll keep you alive and we’ll make millions. Seriously, I think you ought to at least try something that would challenge you rather than say it might have been. I hope things go well at school. Watch yourself at keg parties—I don’t think you have anything to worry about.

August 31, 1967

Took Jane to Pittsburgh today. I wish I had got to know her better these past few years. She has a keen wit and an amazing strength that will see her through anything. I suppose I admire her more than I ever realized.

September 2, 1967

In two weeks I’ll return to school for my final year. An apartment. Bagging the track team. And, of course, that one other aspect of my life at Allegheny College. Every day I think of him. Every day before I go to sleep I relive the past three years and anticipate this next year—and beyond? Today I reread my diary for the past three years. Big Brother Fergus was only half right. He said it was Jerry, not me. I’m convinced it’s both of us. What will Jerry Caraggino and I come up with this year? Whatever happens, after this year, it will be over and maybe finally I will be able to feel good about myself.

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The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely co-iincidental.