Town & Country

MY FATHER’S GIRLFRIEND CAME home from the casino a day early and caught him having sex with the woman across the street.

“I thought you were going to be gone another day,” my dad said by way of apology, or explanation, or perhaps just narration. His girlfriend, Ellen, had been away on her annual girls’ weekend in Jackpot, but since these “girls” were all at least seventy, they were forced to cut the trip short when one of them had a heart attack playing keno at Cactus Pete’s.

All of which is to say, my father and his girlfriend were not the age you’d expect for this kind of drama. Dad was seventy-three, but he’d lately begun exhibiting signs of dementia, one of which, I was surprised to find out, was this late-in-life promiscuity, an erosion of inhibitions. Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street.

This wasn’t the first time, either. To hear Ellen tell it, my father had devolved to the point that he had the impulse control of a teenager. He’d whistle at women on the street and proposition waitresses right in front of her. Ellen could be a little crass herself, and she didn’t seem overly angry, or even that sad. “I’m just done with the son of a bitch,” she said. The neighbor was the last straw. She told me she had no choice but to kick Dad out of her house, where he’d lived since my mother died fourteen years earlier.

As I backed Dad out of her driveway, Ellen stood, arms crossed, behind the screen door. Next to me, in the passenger seat, Dad squirmed under his seat belt like a kid. The backseat was filled with boxes of his clothes.

“I feel like she’s slut-shaming me,” Dad said.

“That’s not what that means,” I said.

I HAD KNOWN for some time that Dad was fading; it was one of the reasons I moved back to Boise from Portland three years earlier. Dad had begun forgetting names and places and said increasingly strange and inappropriate things. He seemed lost at times, disoriented, and was often unsure of the year, the season, the day—classic signs of dementia. But, for me, there was nothing as alarming as the day in 2016 when Dad told me he’d voted for Donald Trump for president, that he liked Trump’s whole “make shit great again” thing. There were two reasons this worried me: (1) Dad was a lifelong Democrat, a third-generation union craftsman who had never voted Republican in his life. And (2) my father was not a moron.

“Dad, you said a month ago that Trump was a dangerous idiot.”

“Yeah, but that woman he’s running against, I don’t like her.”

That woman. Could he even remember Hillary Clinton’s name? I pointed out how that woman had been secretary of state, a U.S. senator, and first lady for eight years. That Dad had twice voted for that woman’s husband.

“But this email thing—” he said.

My dad didn’t own a computer. He wouldn’t know an email from an emu. But this was what happened with him now—he would hear some phrase on TV (Hillary’s emails, slut shaming, Make America Great Again) and it would rattle around in his brain until it became real.

“What about her emails?” I asked.

“Well.” He paused for a moment. “I sure as hell don’t want her sending any to me.”

I HAVE MY dad’s eyes. Or so I’ve been told. Ever since I was a kid. The long forehead, too, and the square jaw. When I was young this confused me: How can two people have the same eyes? As I got older, I realized what was strange was looking so much like a man with whom I had so little in common.

I am gay, an only child, a nonathletic, monogamous nonsmoker. At this point in my life, my idea of fun is a walk, a late dinner, and a glass of wine while I watch cooking competition shows with the boyfriend that I wish I still had.

Dad grew up rowdy, as he puts it, in “a different time,” boozing and brawling from birth with his three rough brothers, smoking at thirteen, and, by sixteen, dropping out of high school. He joined the army at eighteen, was drummed out dishonorably at twenty, married at twenty-three, and worked the next forty years as a machinist at a tool-and-die—all while treating his body like a tavern ashtray. Even in his seventies, Dad was going through four packs of smokes and a fifth of bourbon a week. And then there were the indiscretions against my mom, “the occasional broad,” as Dad put it.

“I was never a choirboy, Jay,” he said over breakfast a few days after Ellen tossed him out and he moved in with me. I wondered if he remembered that I actually was a choirboy, a decent baritone in my high school choir and later at the University of Portland.

“And I wasn’t always loyal to your mother,” Dad said.

“I’d rather not talk about this,” I said.

“I’m just saying—”

“Dad, I know what you’re saying—”

“I was quite the cocksman in my day.”

“Okay.” I pushed my cereal away.

“Damn right,” Dad said.

I could still see my father under this molting old man shell—his sturdy jaw beneath the whiskery jowls, the roping arms, the black pompadour beneath the thinning gray, the bar-fight danger he carried into his fifties and sixties.

And if Dad’s profane candor was new, my father embarrassing me certainly wasn’t. When I was growing up, Dad was the guy smoking in his car outside high school, the guy saying inappropriate things about my teachers. (“Quite a rack on that Mrs. Kennedy.”) He came to choir concerts with a cocktail he mixed himself. Not a beer. A thermos full of R&R and Pepsi.

For years, I had pushed both of my parents to get healthier. I eventually convinced Mom to quit smoking, but it was too late, and her end was excruciating, as she suffocated from emphysema.

If initially she had been heartbroken by what she called my “lifestyle,” Mom and I eventually made our peace and she came to see me as the same conscientious, straight-A student I’d always been—well, minus the straight part. Her early death (I was only twenty-five) hit me harder as time went on, and after a year or two I realized what I’d lost: the one person whose hopes for me were as profound as my own. It was around this time that I began pleading with Dad to change his lifestyle. “I don’t want to lose you, too,” I told him, a confession that clearly made him uncomfortable. “You need to start taking care of yourself.”

“Oh, I’m taking care of myself,” he said. Then he winked and took a long drag of a Carlton.

And now, fourteen years of booze and cigarettes later, here he was, moving into a bedroom in my apartment—just as I’d once lived in a bedroom in his house. My most recent and most serious boyfriend, Levi, had moved out of my place a year earlier, so I put Dad in the spare room we’d used for Levi’s home office.

There were still indentations from Levi’s big desk in the back bedroom. We’d found this antique executive desk at a thrift store, and Levi had fallen inexplicably in love with it. It was a desk for a mining magnate, not a work-from-home freelance writer. But Levi just had to have it, and the carpet was still dented where that behemoth had once sat.

“Absolutely no smoking in here, understand?” I said to Dad. “I’ll never get that smell out of the carpet. Go out to the landing if you need a cigarette.”

“Got it,” he said.

Two minutes later I smelled smoke.

I threw open the bedroom door. Dad was lying on the bed in his underwear, reading from his old collection of classic Hustler magazines, one eye closed against the curling smoke of his cigarette. “A little privacy?” he said.

EVERY GAY KID must remember the day he came out to his parents. Mine was fairly late—sophomore year of college. But I was late admitting it to myself, too. I grew up in suburban Boise and went to a conservative high school filled with Mormons and Catholics—I don’t think I realized that I could be gay. I know that sounds crazy or deluded or repressed, but it’s strange how you can just close off part of yourself if you sense that it’s unaccepted. So, all through high school, I maintained a series of relationships with girls that lasted three or four months. But at some point between first kiss and taking off clothes I always managed to engineer a heartfelt breakup. Then I’d mope around my room, missing Christy, mourning Courtney. These tended to be choir and drama girls—not the leads or soloists, but pleasant wallflowers with some basic adolescent affliction (lank hair, bad skin). My mother had tried for years to have more kids—she had miscarriages before and after me—and so whenever I brought home a girl, I could see on her face the desire for grandchildren. As for Dad, it was a chance to run through his old up-down-up female inventory: legs-butt-boobs-face, face-boobs-butt-legs. Then he’d give me a look from his recliner that said: Not bad.

These high school girlfriends and I did a lot of talking on the phone, posing for dance pictures, kissing in cars. But I was two seconds into my first kiss with a boy in my dorm, accompanied, a few days later, by my first hand job, when I knew this felt different. Oh. Right. I see.

I spent the requisite semester of freshman year trying to convince people, myself mostly, that I was bisexual (perhaps I would only half-disappoint my parents), but that line of defense fell away early in my sophomore year, when I met Phillip, who lived on another floor of my dorm.

Phillip was the most out person I’d ever met, a master of the hip-tilt-snarky-comment-Broadway-musical affect that I felt would be required of me at some point to even get into a gay bar. It was like he had taken some class that I’d missed. I started to see him as a kind of queer mentor and one day I asked his advice: How should I go about telling my old army dad and housewife mom about my new self?

“First of all, don’t say it’s ‘new’ or they’ll think it’s a phase and put you in conversion therapy,” Phillip said. “They have to know that this is just who you are. Who you’ve always been. Don’t apologize, or make excuses, or act like you didn’t mean it. Just walk in and say, ‘Mom? Dad? Turns out I like dudes.’”

“You didn’t do that—”

“Of course I didn’t do that! I was eleven!”

“You came out at eleven?”

“My parents knew before I did anyway,” Phillip said. “They were like, ‘Yep, more Mini-Wheats, Nancy?’”

I felt so emboldened by Phillip’s story that I wondered if maybe my parents suspected, too. I called Mom and said I’d be home for the weekend and needed to talk. No one in my little family had ever scheduled a talk before, and she was suspicious. It was a seven-hour drive from Portland to Boise, and I had second thoughts the whole way, third thoughts parking in front of the house, fourth opening the front door to our rancher, and fifth when I saw the backs of their heads in the living room.

It was early evening, just after dinner. Mom and Dad were on their reclining sofa watching Wheel of Fortune. They were drinking whiskey sodas, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling in the air above the ashtray they shared. This was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen my parents do.

They glanced over at me in unison.

“You got someone pregnant,” my mother said. In her voice I heard equal parts worry and hope.

“No, Mom,” I said. “I’m gay.”

“Oh.” Mom stared at me for a few seconds. “Oh!” she said again. Then she burst into tears and left the room.

I couldn’t read Dad’s face at all. He took another drag of his cigarette and turned back to the TV. Finally, he said, “But you haven’t done anything about it, right?” He seemed to think that as long as I hadn’t, say, waxed my chest or blown anybody, it wouldn’t be official, and I could still change my mind.

Mom came back into the room then. She had composed herself and put on makeup. My mother had beautiful, porcelain skin, even as a lifetime smoker, but she was insecure about her fair coloring. “It’s good that you got your father’s skin and not this wet paste,” she’d always say. Freshly blushed, she sat down next to me on the love seat and took my hand.

She apologized and said she hadn’t cried because I was gay. She said, above all, she wanted me to be happy. The reason she’d cried was the sudden realization that she would never be a grandmother.

“But, Mom,” I said, “gay people can have kids, too.”

“Oh,” she said. And then she burst into tears again. “I’m sorry. I guess that doesn’t make me feel better.”

But, as I say, we made our peace after that. Which I’m glad for, because five years later, she was gone. And then it was just Dad and me.

AFTER ELLEN THREW him out, Dad lived with me for about three months. It was even harder than I’d imagined—living with his terrible habits and his fading memory. Eventually I got him to confine his smoking to his room, and I did my best to keep the other disasters at bay.

Most days when I got home from work, Dad was already drunk—and we’d spend the rest of the night arguing over what to watch on TV—or he was gone, and I’d have to tour the neighborhood bars looking for him. He’d lost his driver’s license two years earlier, after his third DUI (when he also totaled his car), so he always ventured out on foot. There were five bars within a mile of my apartment, but sometimes he just kept walking, looking for a specific tavern from his youth. I put my business card in his wallet, and bartenders would call when Dad had worn out his welcome. Once, I got a phone call from a massage therapist saying that Dad had come in and asked about getting a happy ending.

When Levi and I moved back to Boise three years earlier, I had taken a job as a graphic designer for the state of Idaho, making brochures for various state agencies, so now I at least had the flexibility to leave work early to pick Dad up. I’d lecture him on the way home about urinating outside or shoplifting porno mags. I’ve heard people describe caring for their parents as a kind of reverse parenthood, but I had no idea. I had to cook for him, clothe him, clean up after him.

It was like living with a horny, alcoholic toddler. At the same time, his memory seemed to be leaking out even faster. He forgot basic details and was easily confused in conversations. “Why don’t you ever have any girlfriends over?” he asked me one day.

“Dad, I’m gay.”

He laughed like I’d just told a great joke.

Another time I said something about Mom, and I could see by the way he stared at me that he was remembering that his dead wife had also been my mother. On Valentine’s Day, I asked if he wanted to bring flowers to Ellen, to see if she might forgive him and take him back.

“Your mom?”

“No, Dad. Ellen. Mom’s name was Marjorie.”

“Marjorie,” he repeated, as if he’d been trying to remember that fact.

“That’s right. And your girlfriend’s name was Ellen. Until she threw you out.”

“Marjorie threw me out?”

“No, Dad,” I said, speaking more slowly. “Marjorie was Mom’s name. She died fourteen years ago. You moved in with Ellen a few months after that.” I didn’t mention how, at the time, I had been uncomfortably aware of how quickly Dad took up with Ellen and had suspected some romantic overlap. “Ellen threw you out because you slept with the lady across the street, remember?”

Dad smiled like he was hearing this story for the first time. “I always was quite the cocksman.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard.”

Another time, when I went into a bar near my apartment to pick him up, he raised his glass as I approached. “Another one of these,” he said. I could see he had no idea who I was.

“Dad? I’m not the bartender. It’s Jay. Your son.”

He stared at me. He was quiet a moment. Then: “Why don’t you ever bring girlfriends home?”

So. This was to be our Sisyphean hell—me coming out to my fading father every day for the rest of his life.

“YOU CAN’T KEEP taking care of him like this,” Levi said on the phone one day. Levi and I still talked once a week or so—which was great, although I feared I was hanging on to something that was clearly over, like a spoiled grandkid selfishly keeping Nana on life support.

“I can’t just throw him out,” I said.

Levi didn’t say anything. Technically, I had thrown Levi out a year earlier.

The trouble had started over my infatuation with a guy at work. It got serious rather quickly and I eventually asked Levi for some time apart to think about what I wanted. He wasn’t nearly as upset as I’d imagined he’d be. In fact, he said he’d suspected this was coming and had a place picked out in Portland. I was flummoxed. “How could you know this was coming when I didn’t?”

“You always call yourself a serial monogamist,” Levi said. “But what you really do is trade people in when they get too close.” He didn’t need to remind me of my past: a series of one- and two-year relationships, or that when he and I had gotten together, I had broken up with my boyfriend Aaron to date him.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said, as he measured his ridiculous, giant desk for the movers.

He turned. “I say this with love, Jay. But ask yourself this—how much have you really changed since you were running away from those high school girlfriends before they could figure out who you really are?”

That was ridiculous, I told him. I wasn’t closeted anymore. But his words stung. And they felt true in some way that I could see, but not understand.

At work I tried the new guy for a while, but Levi’s words haunted me, and I found out pretty quickly the limits of falling for someone simply because of a CrossFit chest. (Just shy of three weeks, it turns out.) By then, Levi and his big desk were back in Portland.

And I hadn’t dated anyone seriously since.

“But look at you now,” Levi said, “living with a sophisticated older gentleman.”

“Yes,” I said. “And apparently quite the cocksman.”

“How does he like Chopped?” Levi asked.

“He says, ‘Why are we watching people cook food we can’t eat?’”

“It’s a good point,” Levi said. “So, what are you going to do now?”

I said I didn’t know.

It was probably a week after this conversation that the state police called me at work. “Jay Curtis? We have your father.” The trooper said that Dad had wandered nearly four miles from my apartment and was walking up a freeway on-ramp, headed north. He was drunk. When the trooper questioned Dad, he told them he was headed to the old mining town of Wallace, to find “the whore who popped my cherry.” This had happened in 1963.

IT’S ONE OF the hardest decisions you can make, putting a parent in a nursing home. We started visiting places—Something Garden and Whatever Glen—but each place seemed worse than the last. Dad was fading mentally, but his body still seemed reasonably healthy, and I couldn’t imagine putting him in one of these places, with their long, sad corridors lined with palsied people looking up desperately from wheelchairs, the depressing activity room airing some old black-and-white movie, the hacks, coughs and cries coming from behind closed doors, the antiseptic whiff of all those cleaners, none of which could cover the deeper smells of urine and death.

The less restrictive assisted living and transitional retirement homes didn’t have a spot for Dad, because of his dementia. They recommended memory care—secure facilities that tried to hide their locked-down, institutional nature with bright paint and children’s toys. But when we visited these kinder-prisons, with their bolted doors, their suspiciously patient, ass-wiping staff, and all those vacant faces staring off into nothingness, I felt bereft. Worst of all, there was no one I could talk to about any of this. I had never really missed the siblings I didn’t have—but I felt a great loneliness in this decision. Dad was stone quiet during the tours, and the minute we left, he seemed to have no memory of what we’d just seen. Still, I wanted his input. As much as he’d drunk and smoked and screwed his way through life, I still valued his opinion on practical things. Don’t ever buy a car on time. Get a fifteen-year mortgage if you can afford it. Don’t get caught up in gossip at work. Even drunk, Dad had been a decent source of that rare commodity: common sense. And after all, this was his life we were talking about.

“What do you think, Dad?” I asked as we left the Something Eden adult care center, where the director had talked to Dad like he was a four-year-old.

“I think Marjorie lives over there.” Dad pointed to an empty field.

At one point, I had asked the director if there was a place in this facility where Dad could go to smoke. Or if he could have a cocktail now and then.

As with all the nursing homes and dementia care units where I’d asked those questions, the director sputtered and said he didn’t think that was possible.

But these were the only things that still gave Dad any joy: A smoke. A mixed drink. “Not even one cigarette?” I asked. “Or a nightcap before bed?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “Legally, we could never allow that.”

Then, as we were leaving one of the memory care units—Something Manor—a janitor sidled up to us. I’d seen him mopping outside the office. He grabbed Dad by the arm. He was short and bald, with a ruddy nose. His eyes went in different directions.

“There is a place,” he said, his voice a Gollumy rasp. “Town & Country. Up north. My sister is there.” He repeated it for emphasis. “Town. And Country!” Then he pointed to his temple, blinked twice, and scurried away with his mop.

IT TOOK ME a week to find the Town & Country Senior Inn. This was partly because it was nearly four hundred miles away and partly because, as the director said over the phone, it was not technically a licensed elder care facility.

“Wait, which part are you technically not,” I asked, “an elder care facility or licensed?”

“You really have to come and see for yourself,” he said, and when I described my father, he said, “Oh, you’re definitely going to want to come.”

So, one Saturday I threw Dad in the car and we drove seven hours north on twisty Highway 95, straight up the long spine of Idaho.

The Town & Country, it turned out, was an actual motor inn, built in the 1950s on an unincorporated stretch near a stain of a town called Stateline. The building had been updated when it was turned into this “senior residential hotel,” but it was basically the same sprawling, seedy one-story motel it had always been. There was a carport fronting the lobby and, behind that, a chophouse lounge with no windows, a small stage, and smoke-stained carpeting halfway up the walls. The staff at the Town & Country were dressed not like orderlies or nurses, but like employees of a 1960s hotel: women in waitress dresses, men in high-collared blue jackets and gendarme hats. The grounds (if you could call a gravel parking lot that) were dotted with old people wandering around behind tall fences, being steered back to their rooms by men dressed as bellmen and porters.

The director of the Town & Country was named Skip. He was three shades of gray stacked one on top of the other and looked like he might be checking into the hotel himself soon. He said he’d started this place for his own parents, who had run a saloon in one of these old Idaho mining towns. “They really weren’t cut out for the kind of place where Grammy does art projects,” he said.

The Town & Country had a simple, respectful ethos: The elderly folks were not decrepit patients but “hotel guests” checked into one of the forty guest rooms. A few of those rooms were reserved for couples, but most of the guests were single, divorced, widows, or widowers. They could do whatever they wanted in their rooms—smoke, drink, screw, watch TV—but, in a nod to nostalgia, the TVs had only four channels and the phones were rotary dial. (One necessary concession had been to put in a state-of-the-art sprinkler system and nonflammable bedding. “We do tend to get a few snoozing smokers,” Skip admitted.)

A continental breakfast was served each morning in the old hotel lobby from 5:00 a.m. to noon, although if the guests became sick or nonambulatory, the food could be delivered to them “for a room service fee.” Anything extra at the Town & Country would be tacked onto the bill, just like at a hotel. Laundry, meds, a haircut—all could be arranged “for a fee.” There was no group therapy, no activity rooms, no sing-alongs, no crafts projects. There were only two things on the calendar every day: continental breakfast and, beginning at 3:30, dinner and happy hour. “This is what we are most proud of,” Skip said, and with a flourish he produced a thick dinner menu and handed it to my dad.

The food was straight out of my childhood: roast and potatoes, pork chops and applesauce, French dip, Monte Cristo. And the prices! You could have London broil and a baked potato for $4. You could have goulash or spaghetti and meatballs for $2.50.

Skip saw my smile. “Yeah. The prices make them really happy. The real price, the price you’ll get on your monthly bill, is approximately four to five times that.”

The bar menu was just as amazing. A screwdriver for $2. A Tom Collins for $2.50. Beer for 75 cents.

“Our beers are six ounces, and we make really weak cocktails,” Skip said. “We can also break up medication and serve it in nonalcoholic drinks, basically soda or tonic water. They don’t mind taking their Coumadin when it comes in a martini glass. We have a light-jazz combo that plays standards three nights a week—quietly—and two nights we have classic country. No music Sundays and Mondays. Lights out at eight, nine on weekends.”

I looked over. Dad was staring at the menu like it was a time travel portal. “My dad has been having this other issue,” I said. “His, uh, libido.”

Skip nodded, then chose his words carefully. “The dominant model for elder care focuses, of course, on longevity and health. But this can be at the cost of what I would call personal choice. At the Town & Country, we want to preserve personal choice.”

“Which means—”

He smiled, and I saw a black eyetooth. “We go through a lot of penicillin.”

It was unbelievable, like a Rat Pack nursing home. “I have to ask, is this all”—I looked over at Dad, still intently reading the menu—“legal?”

“Oh yes. Well, it is here.” Skip didn’t seem offended. “We picked the county in Idaho with the fewest restrictions. I’m sure if you’ve done your research, you’ll see that we faced some hurdles early on. Regulatory issues, a few fines, back when we were trying to get classified as a senior care facility. We finally got around the red tape by dropping any pretense of offering care, and with a precisely worded contract that indemnifies us against—well, pretty much everything.” He shrugged. “The Town & Country is not a nursing home. It is . . . a senior residential facility that does not discriminate against those for whom old age has had debilitating effects.”

There was another thing that I had begun to wonder but wasn’t entirely sure how to ask. “What about . . . gay people?”

Skip looked a little startled. “Oh.” Then he looked at Dad. “Your dad isn’t—” He cleared his throat. “Because . . . I mean, we aren’t really set up for that.”

“No,” I said, “Dad’s not gay.”

And, as if to punctuate the point, Dad slammed the menu down on Skip’s desk and said, “I’ll have the fish-and-chips and a Scotch and soda.”

HERE’S THE THING about my hometown. It will always break your heart. When I first talked Levi into moving to Boise with me a few years ago, so I could take the state job and be closer to my dad, I warned him. “Levi, this is not going to be like Portland.”

Levi had grown up in Sacramento, and he insisted that every gay kid felt constrained by his hometown. “No gay kid likes where he’s from,” he said, “because that place probably didn’t accept him. There are probably queers in Paris who felt suffocated.”

In fact, Levi ended up liking Boise—it had good restaurants for a city its size and friendly people. Most of all, Levi liked what it lacked: rain and pretentiousness. Portland was gloomy, crowded, and expensive. Boise was laid-back and outdoorsy, and housing was affordable. “What’s not to like?” Levi said, and for the first month he had that look people sometimes get when they move to Boise, that crazed, how-are-we-getting-away-with-this, can-you-believe-how-livable-this-city-is look.

Still, I warned him to be careful. “You’ll get complacent, and then bang, some ignorant, reactionary shit will stop you cold. Like, for instance, at Dad and Ellen’s house.” But when we visited them, Dad and Ellen were on their best drunk behavior, and they even kept the volume turned down on the Fox News.

It was true, Boise was far more progressive than the city I’d left at eighteen, but all the bike trails and vegan bakeries in the world couldn’t change the fact that real ugliness existed out there, just beyond the city limits. It was like we lived in two different places—cosmopolitan, techie Boise, and backwoods, scary Idaho.

And sure enough, six months after we arrived, Levi and I were walking home from dinner when a big Ford pickup rolled up. We both tensed. The driver’s-side window rolled down, and a dude in a ball cap leaned out and said, almost as if asking for directions, “Fags.” Then he rolled up his window and drove away.

To his credit, Levi laughed off the asshole in the pickup truck. (“Duh,” he said.) He even developed a catchall phrase for such things: so Idaho. “That’s so Idaho,” he said when a religious group put up a billboard near our apartment comparing homosexuality to pedophilia. Or, when a couple stared at us holding hands in a restaurant, “Why do they have to be so Idaho?” And when that old corrupt bigot Trump won the Republican nomination: “No way half of Americans would vote for someone so Idaho, would they?”

It’s not fair, of course, besmirching a whole state, but it doesn’t take too many Confederate flags in truck windows and MARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN bumper stickers to make you forget being fair.

So, when I told Levi that I could not put Dad in the Town & Country, I couldn’t imagine a better description.

“It’s the most Idaho place in Idaho,” I said.

Levi laughed. “That almost makes me miss Boise.”

I felt a buzz in my stomach. “You could come visit,” I said, trying to sound casual.

Levi didn’t say anything.

“Mrs. McIntyre on the first floor asked about you the other day,” I said. “I told her you were doing great. She said, ‘I didn’t realize you guys stayed in touch after you stopped . . . you know.’”

Levi laughed. “Well, the smart ones don’t.” We sat there quietly, breathing on the phone.

Then I changed the subject again. “They don’t even take gay people at the Town & Country. The guy looked apoplectic when I asked.”

Levi was quiet for a moment. “Why would you ask him that?”

I couldn’t answer. Why would I ask that? I pictured Dad in that back bedroom, his skinny old legs and butt, thickening stomach and chest. The man was built like an ice-cream cone. Was it where I was headed, that body? Was that me in there, too? Me, almost forty, with no children—just like Mom had feared—and no boyfriend, no one in the world but Dad. And when I reached Dad’s age, the Town & Country age, who would be there to take care of me, the way I was taking care of Dad?

“Jay?” Levi asked, still on the line. “Are you okay?”

I could hear Dad banging around in the kitchen, no doubt looking for food. “Yeah,” I told Levi. “I’m fine. I’m just—”

I looked up then. Dad was in my bedroom doorway, in nothing but his underwear, holding a bottle of extra virgin olive oil. “Is this the only lube we have?” he asked.

ELLEN ALWAYS CALLED Dad “that old son of a bitch.” Dad called her “that salty broad.” Levi used to say that Ellen had the voice of a leaf blower, but he did appreciate that we were rarely in the door five minutes before she yelled from the kitchen, “Cocktail, honey?”

I called her one day and told her how Dad had declined even more since moving out of her house, and this seemed to soften her a bit. “Poor bastard. I was afraid that might happen.”

I told her about the nursing homes we’d visited. “You can’t put your dad in a place like that. He’ll die. Right after he burns the place to the ground.” I didn’t tell her about the Town & Country.

Somewhere during this conversation, she invited us over for dinner and I saw, at last, an opening. I’d read that with severe dementia cases, you could sometimes settle them back into an old routine and they’d regain some of their sharpness. If I could get Ellen and Dad back together, maybe . . .

It was rich irony. I once had hated Ellen, had suspected Dad of seeing her even before Mom died. She was cranky and crude, and obviously not the mother I missed so deeply. But here I was, seeing her as my last chance, and when she admitted that she had “missed the old so-and-so,” I knew I had one chance to get this right. I helped Dad get dressed—his best slacks and a nice button-down shirt. Parted his gray hair and slicked it down. “Where are we going?” he kept asking.

“Ellen’s house.”

“Is Ellen your girlfriend?”

“Ellen is your girlfriend.”

He looked proud of himself. “Well—” he said.

“Yep,” I said, “quite the cocksman.”

On the way, I stopped for flowers. “You wanna pick ’em out, Dad?”

“I don’t bring women flowers,” Dad said. “There’s only one thing I bring a woman.”

“Okay, then.” I ran into the store and grabbed a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers. I even stopped to look at a rack of little plush toys. Ellen had a houseful of figurines and stuffed animals, many of them wearing T-shirts that said GET WELL or HANG IN THERE. But in the end, wine and flowers seemed like enough.

I was halfway across the parking lot when I saw that Dad was no longer in my car.

The grocery store was on a busy street. There were bars in both directions. I put the flowers and wine in the car and set off searching for him. It was twenty minutes before I found him. He was on drink number two in an Irish bar.

“Hey . . .” he said, clearly recognizing me but blanking on my name. He toasted me with a whiskey on the rocks.

“Dad, we have to go. We’re going to see Ellen, remember?”

“Is Ellen your girlfriend.”

“No, Dad. Ellen is your girlfriend. I’m gay!”

A few people turned, amazed and moved (and a few surely disgusted) to be witnessing a forty-year-old man coming out to his seventy-three-year-old father in a dive bar.

Finally, I got him outside, but he was already drunk. Getting him into the car was like trying to seal a live mouse in an envelope.

Ellen was half-potted, too, by the time we arrived. She’d hit the rum early and was understandably pissed that we were late. “Tell that old cocksucker he can rot in hell for all I care.”

“That’s a little harsh,” I said and handed her the flowers. “These are from Dad. He feels terrible.”

“Why doesn’t he give them to me himself if he feels so terrible?”

“He’s feeling a little shy,” I said. In fact, I had left him sound asleep in the passenger seat, hoping to smooth things over and then bring him in. “He wanted me to apologize.”

She seemed dubious but said she would warm up the dinner that had gotten cold.

But when I went out to the car, he wasn’t there. It was Ellen, standing on her porch, who pointed him out, banging on the door of the woman across the street. Perhaps I should have been pleased that he’d finally remembered something—the amorous sixty-year-old neighbor—but at that point I was fairly certain my life was over.

Dinner was cool and short, and Dad slept on the drive home. I could barely stir him when we got to my apartment. He’d wet his pants again. This happened every few weeks, after he’d had too much to drink.

“Come on, Dad,” I said. I threw his arm over my shoulder, and half carried him into the building. He smelled awful. He tried to push me away.

“Let me go!” he said. We walk-wrestled down the hall.

He smelled like stale piss. “Damn it, Dad, stop fighting me!”

Finally, I got him through the door and into his smoky bedroom. I dumped him on the bed, next to his ashtray and porno mags, a little harder than I needed to.

I undid his wet pants and started wriggling them over his bony legs. That’s when I realized he’d shit himself, too.

“Let me go,” he said again.

FOR A WHILE, when you first come out, that fact feels like the main aspect of your identity. You’re not a student or a Capricorn or an optimist. You’re a gay. In some ways, I think, this can be a relief. You don’t have to confront any other failings, flawed thinking, lack of confidence, trouble communicating. Or the loneliness. Because of your family, or your religion, or a general lack of cultural acceptance, you can always fall back on a handy excuse: This is why I feel so alone. But over time, this fact recedes again, and you are simply who you are.

The night I came out to my parents, my mom finished crying, apologized, and told me that she loved me no matter what. Then she went to bed—probably to cry some more. I wandered into my old bedroom, still covered in sports posters. I wished I hadn’t told them, that I’d just moved away and lived my life somewhere else, on the beach in Southern California, or riding motorcycles in Spain. I listened to cassettes for a while, headphones on, sitting across from my bedroom mirror, sulking and staring at my pimply face—Dad’s face, as I’d always been told, but without some quality that his face had. His willfulness, an ease with his appetites.

I went out to use the bathroom and found Dad fixing himself a cocktail at the bar in the dining room.

“Want one?” he asked.

Dad had never offered me a drink before.

“No, thanks,” I said. Then: “Okay, sure.”

He looked like he was trying to find something to say, and I imagined it would be a deeper inquiry into precisely what I had and hadn’t done with my new perverted hobby—perhaps the exact number of dongs I’d slopped.

He finished mixing us whiskey sodas and then he turned to face me. “Look, I don’t know anything about”—he waved his hand—“whatever you’re getting yourself into here.” He was a bit soused, at the point where it sounded like his voice was being poured from a decanter. “In fact, I don’t know shit about shit. But I know this: If you find something in this world that makes you happy—do that.”

WE LEFT FIRST thing in the morning and arrived at the Town & Country at 4:00 p.m., in time for happy hour. The car’s tires crunched on the gravel lot.

We went through the hotel lobby into the lounge. I settled Dad at a table, in a big leather chair. The room was dusk-lit, already full of dressed-for-dinner old people squinting at huge menus. The menus were so big in part because the font was massive, at least 20-point. I sat with Dad a minute. He looked around, taking it all in.

Our waitress came over and brought us two waters in old café glasses. She had on a blond Marilyn Monroe wig. Like all the waitresses, she was in her sixties. They all wore blond Marilyn Monroe wigs. Up close, the wigs looked ridiculous, too low on their foreheads, but also familiar somehow, and then it hit me—they looked a little like the current president.

That’s when I realized how brilliant the Town & Country was—the whole thing. Brilliant. The last whiff of a made-up world my father believed he had grown up in. This Idaho, this America, this Town & Country, with its ridiculous subsidized $2 meat loaf and 75-cent glasses of Miller, its four channels and rotary telephones and no blacks or gay people, none of that trans-nonbinary nonsense. This is where he wanted to live, in a manufactured Idaho motor hotel of nostalgia and denial. And this is how we have chosen to go out—as a country—smoking and drinking and straight-fucking our way right into oblivion.

“I have to go fill out paperwork now, Dad,” I said. “And then I’m gonna get you settled and leave, okay? You might not see me for a while.”

“Where are you going?”

“Well, tonight I’m going to Portland to see Levi. Do you remember Levi?”

He looked at me. Nothing.

“He was my boyfriend,” I said, “but I messed it up. Now I’m going to try and fix it. What do you think of that, Dad?”

He stared at me, not comprehending.

“But I’ll get up here as much as I can. And Ellen said she’d come visit.”

He looked confused and opened his mouth to say something.

“No, Ellen is not my girlfriend,” I said. “I’m gay, remember?”

He looked back down at the giant menu and just then the platinum waitress arrived back at our table. “Hiya, sweetie,” she said.

“Hiya, doll,” Dad said back.

I stood and told the waitress, “I’m going to finish filling out the paperwork, and then I’ll come back and get him settled in his room.”

She nodded to me and said, to Dad, “Have you had a chance to look at the menu, darlin’? You know what you want?”

“Oh, I know what I want,” Dad said.

“I’m gonna like you, aren’t I?” the waitress said. “So, what can I bring you to eat, sugar?”

Dad looked at the menu again. “Salisbury steak, au gratin potatoes, Seven and Seven.”

“You betcha,” said the waitress.

I turned to leave. “Okay, Dad. I’ll be back.” And I started to walk away.

“Wait!” Dad said, but when I turned, it wasn’t me he was talking to. It was the waitress. “Can you make that a double?”

The waitress smiled, the light from the kitchen suddenly behind her so all I could see was her silhouette and the glow of that blond wig. “We always do, honey.”