CHAPTER 17

The day finally came for the MRI. I thought it was preposterous, having to drag my father out of a warm hospital bed and into his cold Camaro to drive all the way out Reisterstown Road. But Heidenheimer didn’t think me having to drive him was such a big deal. “Mr. Aronson isn’t hooked up to anything,” the doctor said. I was still anxious about taking him. No one seemed to understand how serious his situation was. If anything, he should have been choppered in the way they do it in the movies, greeted by a team of experts ducking from the wash of the helicopter blades.

My father felt the way I did—it was preposterous. The day of the appointment, he refused to change out of his pajamas. He wanted to keep the flannel comfort layer next to his skin, so he put his jeans on over the red-and-white pajama bottoms with the peppermint stripes sticking out of his pant legs. Then the red tartan bathrobe Susan bought him, which hung down past the hem of his overcoat. Topped off with the green knit hat. We thought the whole trip was crazy. He wasn’t supposed to leave the hospital until they fixed what was wrong with him.

It was raining, as it was so often that December. I brought the car around while he waited in the lobby in a wheelchair. He knew he looked pathetic, especially in that loony outfit, so whenever someone in a white coat walked by, he mugged and called out “Help me! Help me, doctor!”

“I’m sure they didn’t think that was funny,” I said when my father recounted this in the car. “I wasn’t kidding,” he said. I drove us west on Northern Parkway, a wide road with white pavement that turned a melancholy cola color in the rain, and then north on the potholed blacktop of Reisterstown Road. The radio played to the beat of the windshield wipers. I am a poor boy too pa rum pa pum pum. I turned up the volume a little bit. Both of us were suckers for Christmas songs. We passed the old Ameche’s Drive-in, the bowling alley, Sol Levinson & Sons Funeral Home, and the Plaza. Cars hissed by in the opposite direction, tires spraying. Miller’s Delicatessen, Amy Joy Donuts, the Howard Johnson’s where Susan and I had been waitresses. People passing, children laughing, over the beltway, and left into a mini mall in a wooded lot. He stayed in the car while I checked in at Copeland Imaging.

“It’s outside,” the receptionist said.

“What is?”

“The MRI.” She spoke with a thick Baltimore accent. M-R-Ah.

“But it’s raining,” I said.

She laughed in a good-natured way. “It’s in the trailer.”

Oh. The thing I saw in the parking lot and thought was a bookmobile.

He struggled getting out of the Camaro’s bucket seat, grabbing onto my shoulders. “That’s how new the MRI is,” he said, as we linked arms and slowly made our way to the trailer, dirty puddle water splattering our legs. “So cutting edge the machine isn’t even unpacked. Still in the box.”

I was grateful for his positive spin on the crappy situation. It was 1986 and we thought the technology was awesome. I gave him the umbrella to hold and I went up three portable stairs. A technician opened the trailer door a crack. She didn’t have to come out from behind her desk to do this. She said to wait in the parking lot. Was everyone nuts? Couldn’t she see his pajamas sticking out of his pant legs and mopping up the puddles? She shut the door on me and I backed down the steps. I took the umbrella and held it over us until it was my father’s turn to go in. When they were finished with him, we drove back to the hospital and he changed out of his wet clothes and got back into bed.

That was the point at which I started to take what I needed. Not from him, but from the nurses. I pushed through staff-only doors and carried off supplies – extra blankets, gowns, stacks of foil-covered juice cups, a shower chair, a foam egg crate for the bed, towels, washcloths, body lotion. We were stocking up to wait some more, this time for the results. Then it would be the next test, and the next. I lingered in the hall until the nurse’s station was unmanned and slipped behind the high counter to search for my father’s loose-leaf binder. Every patient got a shiny blue one like a seventh grader. I found his, flipped it open and read the notes. White disheveled male, 69, headache of unknown etiology.