My gravely ill father had put his foot down (Part 7), telling my grandma that if she and Uncle Grisha insisted on bringing his degenerate daughter along then he didn't need them visiting him either. Grandma had called his bluff, letting him sit out Wednesday (Part 8) without a single visitor, and I spent that whole day happily playing with- I mean by myself at home. Doing a couple of cleaning projects I'd been meaning to get to, then watching the Mets game (9-2, we slaughtered 'em!), and then an old Meg Ryan romantic comedy with a pretty heartwarming ending. A peaceful, productive day ....... But all good things must come to an end, and come Thursday it was time to venture back into that hospital room again.

Where to my utter astonishment Papa was pleasant to me from the moment I arrived. Talking to me and everything! Wow, Grandma's little boycott must've really done the trick! But all was not as it seemed...

THOUGH THE EVENTS OF MY STORY HAVE BEEN TOLD IN SEQUENCE SO FAR, THIS CHAPTER AND THE NEXT ARE A BIT DIFFERENT. THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF MY DAY, AND PART 10 MY REUNION WITH AN OLD FRIEND JUST AFTER NOON…

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||| THURSDAY OCT 9 ~~~

Grandma wasn't waiting for me this today when I got to the hospital at 11:00, and I thought she had probably already gone to see Papa. I went up to the sixth floor and risked peeking into his room. He was alone, staring off into space with catatonic stillness and didn't see me. I went back down to our appointed meeting place and sat for twenty minutes, half-watching as Boris Karloff chased Abbott and Costello around a haunted house. Then in what had to be madness itself, I decided to go back upstairs and risk visiting my dad without backup.

As I came through the door he smiled at me. It was vague and kind of crooked, but it was clearly a smile...

"Hi," I said. Was Papa really going to be nice to me, or did he have another surprise in store for me? (A gun?! No that was a bit paranoid.).

"Hello," he answered, and already I could see signs that he was in somewhat better shape than he'd been on Tuesday. He was having an easier time sitting up, his skin was a healthier shade of gray, and his voice didn't sound quite so raspy and faint. He was still a long way from being well though. His IV drip---whatever was in there---was this florescent greenish yellow gunk that looked just like Gatorade.

This was unreal. I hadn't expected such a reception from him, and I wasn't sure what to say. He grinned at me shyly, I grinned back.

"I'm glad you're here," he said, "I need ........... I don't know what I need right now. Maybe just company. Is that okay?"

"Of course. That's why I came," I smiled, letting him know I bore no lasting hard feelings about how he'd been treating me.

Papa startled when I grabbed his hand in both of mine, but then squeezed back. He said, "You look nice."

I let go, straightened my blouse. "Thank you. I've been trying to dress nicer than I was back on Saturday."

"Were you here Saturday? I don't remember."

Surely he couldn't have forgotten such an intense encounter, like the big third act trainwreck in some Tennessee Williams play. Or maybe he meant that he remembered but was unclear about what day it had been, which I could see happening in this place. Though if he really didn't recall all that ("I'm ashamed I ever brought you into this world!") it was probably for the best.

I shrugged, "It's okay. Really."

A weird noise came from his throat, like a dead person trying to laugh. He said dully, "Things are so ......... I don't know. I can't believe how much I'm sleeping. And oh man I had the worst nightmare last night! Or maybe this morning. Do you know anything about dreams?"

"Like what they mean? Not really, but I'd love to hear it."

"Okay, but this was weird. Weird! It was about these ......... these things," he moved his hands around as if literally groping for the right words, "These furry idiot things."

"Idiot things?"

"They were sort of like people but- No they were like bears. Or monkeys. But fat, fat and furry. They had these things coming out of their heads," he said, putting a fist on the crown of his head and sticking his index finger up to illustrate, "There was a blue one, a pink one, a green one, a red one and I think a purple one..."

This sounded very familiar somehow. "And where were you in this dream?"

"I wasn't in it, thank God. It was horrible! They lived in this bunker or something, underneath like a field. Maybe a park. These grassy little hills. It was like the inside of a submarine under there, but it wasn't. All machines and stuff."

"What did the machines do?"

"They didn't do anything. Or maybe they sang. I- None of this made sense! And yeah I know dreams don't make sense, but this was-" he blew his nose on a mint green kleenex from the box in front of him, recoiling in pain. He inspected the results with a look of horror, wadded it up and dropped it onto the cantilever table with some others, like a row of little cabbages.

"Was this in the day or at night?"

"It was day. It's always daytime there. The feild had rabbits, they ate the grass. Maybe the things ate the rabbits. But there was this mood to it; or not even a mood, it- It all felt empty. Like maybe these things were all that was left of the human race, a million years after the bomb or whatever. These weird idiot things, clapping their hands and walking in circles and going 'Blee-blee bloo-bloo blah-blah' like it meant something! It was awful!"

I looked at the t.v. up on the wall. On PBS Clifford the giant red dog was giving all the neighborhood kids a ride. Oh, okay...

"That wasn't a dream, that was on the television. A show that comes on real early on this same channel."

"But nothing they did made any sense!" he barked. "When they talked, all it was was 'La la lee lee!' and 'Gooby-gaggy-goo'! That wasn't on no television."

"It's true, Papa. It's a children's show called the Teletubbies. It's been on for years."

"Why the hell would they show something like that to kids? They wouldn't!!" he shouted, suddenly agitated, panicked by the notion that something so monstrous could be broadcast to millions. (And maybe there is something demonic about the Teletubbies. Somebody had given a stuffed toy of the pink one to Ricky and me as a joke present, and our dog Mike decided that he wanted it. But when he got it in his mouth and it started talking gibberish he dropped it and fled into the other room so fast- Oh God we were in stitches! And our ferocious big baby has been terrified of the thing ever since...)

"Here, I'll show you, it's in the t.v. listing," I said, looking around for the copy of the Times that usually formed a messy pile somewhere in this room, but now I didn't see one...

"Why are you lying to me? Is this some kind of game? Some sick game?"

"Of course not-"

"It is! You're trying to mess with people when you know they already don't remember things so good! Some sick, pyscho psychology shit," he hollared, "You write it down, or you got a- A camera behind that mirror there, or-or-or-"

He was furious, and was having a real hard time breathing. I had to get him calmed down!

"All right, maybe you're right. It kind of sounded like a kid's show I saw once, but it doesn't matter. Whether it was a dream or whatever, it's over! It doesn't matter what it was, okay Papa? So just please-"

"Papa?! What kind of hospital are you people running here, telling me all this shit?! I don't want you, I want that other nurse! That colored girl, the one who's in charge. I want- GET HER IN HERE NOW GODDAMN IT!" he roared, and with a violent sweep of his arm knocked the tissue box, his reading glasses and the bowl of pudding he'd eaten one spoonful from off of his table and onto the floor!

It was a "Tyler Durden moment". Like that horrifying scene in THE FIGHT CLUB when that character suddenly realizes that major elements of his life had been hallucinated, and all his perceptions and assumptions about what was going were nonsense. No wonder he wasn't angry with me, he doesn't even know who I am!

"Daddy, I'm not a nurse. It's me! It's Joy," I pleaded.

"What? You're not Joy. Joy's my daughter."

"But I AM your daughter. Look at me!" I insisted, grabbing hold of his wrist.

He jerked it out of my grip, "Let go of me you screwy bitch! That's bullshit! Just bullshit! MY DAUGHTER IS SEVEN YEARS OLD!"

I gaped at him. What do you say to something like this? He was probably certain he'd just bought that car of his, that gas was ninety cents a gallon and Ronald Reagan was in the White House...

Once again with my father I'd fallen down the rabbit hole into some place I had never imagined and didn't know how to cope with. I'd never had to deal with an Alzheimer's patient, anyone like that, and was at a total loss here. I put my hands up and started backing away from him, "Okay Papa- uh, I mean, I'll just-"

"You tellin' me you're my daughter, and I'm on television with them things after the bomb?! NO! That's just CRAZY! Get that Janice in here, you headfucker bitch! Her I can maybe get some truth out of-"

His vital signs must have gone through the roof because now here she was, the nurse that had yelled at me when I'd almost plowed her into on Saturday. She ordered me from the room with a jerk of her head.

"Here she is," howled my father, "She'll tell you! She'll tell you! She'll tell you! She'll tell you!"

"I guess I'll try again tomorrow," I muttered as I squeezed past her.

She smiled consolingly, "That's all you can do, Honey."

I fled down the hall with my father's voice echoing behind me, screaming about the furry idiot things and the "Blee Blee! Bloo Bloo!"

I wound up crying my eyes out in a park a mile or so from the hospital, where I ran into Jennifer Thurston, an old friend of Joy’s and mine from high school It was a bittersweet encounter. Not that I have any problem with Jennifer, and she was delighted to run into her friend Joy again. But seeing her with her tiny three-month old baby made me inexplicably sad. [I'll tell you the whole story of my meeting with Jen-Jen in PART 10 ~ MOTHERSHIP DOWN. It deserves its own chapter.]

Our day together flew by, and I went home to find…

Okay. I had promised that I wouldn't keep bitching about Joey's smoking in this memoir. And I came to agree with my editor Elsa when she said that I was coming off as strident (or whiny was how she'd put it...) and deleted several long passages about this at her behest. But this here was just goddamn ridiculous!!

When I walked into the house Joey was in the living room, crouched in front of the video cabinet, deep in conversation with himself and smoking like a chimney. The room was clouded up like one of those scenes from the old Cheech & Chong movies, where the boys are indulging heavily in their favorite pasttime- only this wasn't marijuana smoke. I almost wished it had been, it would have smelled better...

I opened the window. It was 95 degrees out, why was the damn thing even closed?

"Gawd, Joey! What are you doing?"

"I'm organizing Dad's movies. He's got them crammed in here any old way, war movies next to comedies next to science fiction- no fucking order to 'em at all. I'm sorting them into genres and alphabetizing each one. I kind of wanted to do something with directors but I don't really know directors like you do, and Spielberg here does both comedies and heavy shit, so I-"

"No! I mean this!" I said, waving my arm through the cloud of smoke, visibly disturbing it, "Are you trying to give me cancer?!"

"Oh sorry. I guess I have been kind of smoking a lot."

"You guess?"

There was a brimming ashtray on the floor next to him. I picked it up and hauled into the kitchen. He got up and followed me, telling me excitedly about an idea he had for a movie: "about this kid who everybody picks on at school until he discovers he has like these superpowers..."

And another ashtray sat overflowing onto the kitchen table. Even discounting the half dozen butts with KOOL printed on them in green letters, that were clearly someone else's (Joy had loathed the menthols I used to smoke, to the extent that I seldom had to worry about her pilfering mine), he must have gone through two packs worth here today. I had NEVER seen my sibling smoke this much; except maybe at our mother's funeral where she'd been chaining nonstop, tossing the butts into the open grave, giving Mom snipes to smoke in the afterlife...

I carried them to the steel trash can, stepped on the pedal to raise the lid and dumped them both in.

He sighed resignedly, "Okay, I guess I should start going out on the porch."

"THANK you!"

"But look, I mopped the kitchen floor. And the service porch too! And so anyway, the kid, his name is Jimmy Messenger-"

The mop bucket was parked in the middle of the room, the string mop stewing in the gray sudsy water with its handle sticking out parallel to the spotless floor...

"Wow you did! And you did a great job. Thanks for pitching in," I grinned appreciatively as I sat down at the formica table, but I had a bad feeling about what I was seeing here. And hearing.

"-and Jimmy finds out he can move shit with his mind, too, because it turns out he's an alien from the planet Bob---Be funny if there was a planet named Bob, wouldn't it? But of course when they say it wouldn't mean Bob; you know, like the name Bob; Bob could mean 'mighty fortress' in their language, or 'ultimate wisdom', or anything really---which his parents weren't gonna to tell him about 'til he was 16, they wanted him to fit in with the Earth kids and be normal and everything; but he couldn't anyway, and only this one kinda weird girl likes him. I see her as like this Winona Rider type-"

The ravenous smoking, his sudden interest in cleaning, and this sucky movie that he was continuing to rattle off his synopsis of, despite my not showing the slightest interest---("And so then the GOVERNMENT finds out and they send these assassins, and him and his girlfriend have to build this machine-")---since it seemed to be enough that I was there. It all added up to one thing-

Not waiting for a gap in the hemmorhage of words, I said sweetly, "And thanks for sorting out those movies. They were really were a mess."

"-'cause she's an alien too, but from the Omega Quadrant, and her species is at war with his, so both of their parents really don't dig that their kids are- Oh yeah! I should go finish that," he said, and hurried off, leaving me sitting in this acute silence, once again able to think...

Why would there be an Omega Quadrant if there's only four of them?

If I asked him if he was on meth he would just lie about it. And if I persisted and he eventually copped to being tweeked he would minimize it, it was just the one time, he'd quit tomorrow, it wasn't a problem---come on Teddi, you're such a tight-ass!---all that shuck and jive.

He had never been disposed to listen to people at the best of times, and now he was on this garbage, which gave you illusion of being in complete control, so fleet of thought that you must really be a genius after all, that diminished your teachability while it inflated your ego to grotesque proportions; and by tomorrow he'd probably be convinced he was from Planet Bob and could move shit with his mind...

So pleading or arguing would be a complete waste of time. The only thing that could affect him in the slightest would be pain, loss, some privation that would have an actual physical effect on him in a way that words never would. Like say, a trip to jail.

Which was very tempting, and not exactly out of vindictiveness. Reformatories might not reform anyone, and penitentiaries seldom make inmates penitent, but Joy had always cleaned up really well in the joint, looking lots healthier when she got out.

But Joey might not be released by the end of October, and then I would be affected. My position with my company was secure enough that I knew I could get another month or two off while I hung around Princeton in this body, what with my dad being sick and my poor old granny needing me here. But it would seem damned peculiar if I did this all by e-mail, never actually speaking to them.

And short of knocking him out and chaining him to his bedframe with an ankle shackle (another very tempting solution) I didn't have the power to ground him, to forbid him to hang out with so-and-so or to go to wherever. And I wasn't even going to consider involving Grandma in this. She had her hands full right now...

So what then? How to threaten the self-interest of this selfish, self-centered bastard who thought only of himself? What could hurt or alarm him enough to make him want to change his behavior? I pushed the heavy mop bucket out onto the back porch, dumped it out onto the flagstone patio. Squashed the mop's head in the ringer a few times and stood it up to dry in the sun, went inside and opened the fridge. Hungry. And seeing all the food I had stocked it with I had my brainstorm!

If I was alarmed about what he was doing to my body, I would return the favor...

Joy had never much cared what she did to her innards---swiss cheesing her brain with ecstasy, the speed that kept her in a size 2 even as it had started to put lines on her face---but she was fanatical about her weight and waist size. She was quite proud of her slimness, and when it came to fat people she was suddenly a real Puritan. I had heard it so many times: How can she let herself go like that? These people were such losers in Joy's book that they were fair game for mockery, cruel remarks right to their face.

On the top shelf, the bag from Wendy's containing the double stack cheeseburger and french fries that Joey had stuck in here after taking one bite and a few fries. I stuck the whole bag in the microwave and zapped it for 50 second. Old reheated french fries are pretty awful, but my my, how soggy and greasy and fatty they were! I lifted a bunch of them in my fingers and dropped them into my upturned mouth- Oh yeah! Supersize me baby!

How much weight I could pack onto to this petite frame in the next couple of weeks? Even merely doubling my caloric intake---and standing the Food Pyramid on its head---should soon make it fairly obvious. Especially if I wore tight fitting clothes, pushed my belly out, playing it like a bongo drum!

I tore into the soggy burger, snickering at how absolutely FURIOUS he was going to be when he noticed I was putting on weight! I could think of a 100 reasons why intentionally overeating was a REALLY BAD IDEA; but dammit, it would work! He would be mortified, and I'd have exactly the sort of leverage I needed, a sly smile crossing my pudged-out face, 'I'll quit if you will, Brother Dear!'

And anyway it wasn't my own flesh I would be harming. It wasn't like we'd be staying in each other's bodies. I finished the burger and fries then went looking desert. Ah of course- Chunky Monkey ice cream!

Payback is a bitch, and so am I.
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TO BE CONTINUED...
(A bit out of sequence this time,
with Chapter 10 telling about the middle part of this same day)

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AUTHOR'S RAMBLINGS (optional):
I find it a bit unsettlinging when women refer to themselves as bitches, in the way that Teddi did at the close of this chapter, thinking: "My God, is that the only kind of female empowerment you can conceive of? How could being a bitch (or a bastard) be a good thing?" I used it here to show that Teddi isn't thinking too good. When I got to the part of writing her thoughts leading up to her decision, the real start of this grotesquely absurd war with Joey, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make it convincing. Teddi is far more self-aware than the character I'd originally conceived of. I was surprised how I was almost able to make this descent into madness sound almost logical. Now the trick will be to keep her from coming to her senses, or everytime she does Joey gets another tattoo or something. And how do I keep her likeable (I do hope you find her likeable...) as she succumbs to her Italian vendetta genes. Should be innaresting...

The dog terrified of the toy Teletubby is a true story, only it's the blue one she lives in dread of, not the pink one. Poor Isaboo! One of the incomprehensible phrases that issues from the plushy idiot thing sounds like: "I got a gun! I got a gun!"

Josepho's fugue episode was based on two events from my life. Talking to my dying mother (congestive heart failure) in the hospital in 1998 for ten minutes before I realized that she was faking knowing who the heck I was (I seemed to know her, so she was going along...); And also my father's mental disintigration from brain cancer a few years later as my sister and I home hospiced him, which increasing came to resembled some Mad Hatter's Tea Party (was he trying to make a ham sandwich using the coffee maker, or a cup of coffee out of ham and cheese?). Heartbreaking, terrifying in its illogic, and yet at times grotesquely hilarious. This chapter is sort of dedicated to my parents, who never got to know their younger daughter…