The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Sanderson sees his father twice a week. On Wednesday evenings, after he closes the jewelry store his parents opened long ago, he drives the three miles to Crackerjack Manor and sees Pop there, usually in the common room. In his ‘suite,’ if Pop is having a bad day. On most Sundays, Sanderson takes him out to lunch. The facility where Pop is living out his final foggy years is actually called the Harvest Hills Special Care Unit, but to Sanderson, Crackerjack Manor seems more accurate.

Their time together isn’t actually so bad, and not just because Sanderson no longer has to change the old man’s bed when he pisses in it or get up in the middle of the night when Pop goes wandering around the house, calling for his wife to make him some scrambled eggs or telling Sanderson those damned Fredericks boys are out in the backyard, drinking and hollering at each other (Dory Sanderson has been dead for fifteen years and the three Fredericks boys, no longer boys, moved away long ago). There’s an old joke about Alzheimer’s: the good news is that you meet new people every day. Sanderson has discovered the real good news is that the script rarely changes. It means you almost never have to improvise.

Applebee’s, for instance. Although they have been having Sunday lunch at the same one for over three years now, Pop almost always says the same thing: ‘This isn’t so bad. We ought to come here again.’ He always has chopped steak, done medium rare, and when the bread pudding comes, he tells Sanderson that his wife’s bread pudding is better. Last year, the pudding was off the menu of the Applebee’s on Commerce Way, so Pop – after having Sanderson read the dessert choices to him four times and thinking it over for an endless two minutes – ordered the apple cobbler. When it came, Pop said that Dory served hers with heavy cream. Then he simply sat, staring out the window at the highway. The next time he made the same observation, but ate the cobbler right down to the china.

He can usually be counted on to remember Sanderson’s name and the relationship, but he sometimes calls Sanderson Reggie, the name of his older brother. Reggie died forty years ago. When Sanderson prepares to leave the ‘suite’ on Wednesdays – or, on Sundays, after he takes his father back to Crackerjack Manor – his father invariably thanks him, and promises that next time he will be feeling better.

In his young years – before meeting Dory Levin, who civilized him – Sanderson’s pop-to-be was a roughneck in the Texas oilfields, and sometimes he reverts to that man, who never dreamed he would one day become a successful jewelry merchant in San Antonio. On these occasions he is confined to his ‘suite.’ Once he turned his bed over and paid for his efforts with a broken wrist. When the orderly on duty – José, Pop’s favorite – asked why he did it, Pop said it was because that fucking Gunton wouldn’t turn down his radio. There is no Gunton, of course. Not now. Somewhere in the past, maybe. Probably.

Lately, Pop has displayed a kleptomaniacal streak. The orderlies, nurses, and doctors have found all sorts of things in his room: vases, plastic utensils from the dining hall, the TV controller from the common room. Once José discovered an El Producto cigar box, filled with various jigsaw puzzle pieces and eighty or ninety assorted playing cards, under Pop’s bed. Pop cannot tell anyone, including his son, why he takes these things, and usually denies that he has taken them at all. Once he told Sanderson that Gunderson was trying to get him in trouble.

‘Do you mean Gunton, Pop?’ Sanderson asked.

Pop waved a bony driftwood hand. ‘All that guy ever wanted was pussy. He was the original pussy hound from Pussyville.’

But the klepto phase seems to be passing – that’s what José says, anyway – and this Sunday his father is calm enough. It’s not one of his clear days, but not one of the really bad ones, either. It’s good enough for Applebee’s, and if they get through it without his father pissing himself, all will be well. He’s wearing continence pants, but of course there’s a smell. For this reason, Sanderson always gets them a corner table. That’s not a problem; they dine at two, and by then the after-church crowd is back home, watching baseball or football on TV.

‘Who are you?’ Pop asks in the car. It’s a bright day, but chilly. In his oversize sunglasses and wool topcoat, he looks quite a lot like Uncle Junior, that old gangster from The Sopranos.

‘I’m Dougie,’ Sanderson says. ‘Your son.’

‘I remember Dougie,’ Pop says, ‘but he died.’

‘No, Pop, hunh-uh. Reggie died. He …’ Sanderson trails off, waiting to see if Pop will finish. Pop doesn’t. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Drunk, was he?’ Pop asks. This hurts, even after all the years. That’s the bad news about what his father has – he is capable of random cruelties that, while unmeant, can still sting like hell.

‘No,’ Sanderson said, ‘that was the kid who hit him. And then walked away with nothing but a couple of scratches.’