Maybe something about the word “treatment” put me in mind of “treats,” because I couldn’t stop buying my father the frozen yogurt he liked and books I thought might be helpful, like the book critic Anatole Broyard’s cancer memoir Intoxicated by My Illness. I felt happy to serve him, especially now that he was writing thousands of words every day about his life. He didn’t know if it would be a book or an article or something to put in a drawer, but it was the first writing he’d done for or about himself in decades and he was excited about it, so I was excited, too. I thought I should keep listening to the O’Hara tapes, but I figured that could wait. What was important now was helping my father do what he needed to do before he died—and to help my mother cope.
I acted as an as-needed caretaker for my parents’ apartment because they were in the Catskills. When I went by to let a plumber in to fix the toilet, I found the place filthy. Before he joined my mother upstate, my father had been alone in the city for weeks, and it showed. The office was full of ashes and dust. The sheets were stained by the chocolate he ate in bed. The blankets, stuffing escaping, were covered in grime. My father never cleaned the house. He rarely even washed his hands—an affectation buoyed by something he once read about how allergies are caused by being overly hygienic.
I went to change the sheets but couldn’t find any fresh ones. I took a bag full of laundry to the laundromat, and I bought new sheets and blankets at the Astor Place K-Mart. While at the store, I also bought a humidifier and cough drops. For the first decade of my career, I was always in debt. Neal and I fought about money all the time. These days, ghostwriting and the sale of my book about Generation X had made me more financially secure than I’d ever been. For the first time I could spend a couple hundred dollars on my parents’ comfort without worrying.
When I returned from the store, I vacuumed—there were wrappers and loose pills scattered around the bed—and mopped, then put the new bedding on the bed and set the cough drops in a bowl next to the humidifier. If he’s going to die here, I thought, it will be as comfortable as I can make it.
For a couple of weeks after his diagnosis, my father floated around in a pink cloud. He was gentle and kind and paid attention to people. My mother said he hadn’t been like this since before they were married. She seemed happy to have him this way again.
So much of O’Hara’s poetry, I realize now, exists in this sort of brink-of-death pink cloud. In his eulogy for O’Hara, the composer Morton Feldman wrote: “Who but the dead know what it is to be alive? Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence. Frank understood this. That is why these poems, so colloquial, so conversational, nevertheless seem to be reaching us from some other, infinitely distant place. Bad artists throughout history have always tried to make their art like life. Only the artist who is close to his own life gives us an art that is like death.”
During the pink-cloud time, I took my father to a Mets game along with my mother, Neal, Oliver, and family friends Kent and Deborah. Kent, a great doctor, had steered my father to the best medical care. For that, I would have loved him even if he weren’t the funniest and nicest of my parents’ friends. As we were waiting for the rest of our party by the worn home run apple in the Citi Field parking lot, my father said, “Self-knowledge is maybe better never than too late.”
“That’s not true!” I said.
“I was kidding. I’ve been thinking of what you said about the effect I have on people. It’s when I feel most relaxed that I say these things that make them mad. I get too comfortable. And then I try to say something witty, but they come out clever and that makes people run away and then I wonder why I’m all alone.”
“Huh,” I said. “That makes sense. It is true. Clever pushes people away; witty draws people close. Frank O’Hara was witty. He made other people feel at ease.”
At the game, Oliver caught a T-shirt from the T-shirt cannon, which my father took to be a sign of divine approbation. Then Robinson Canó tried to throw Oliver a ball, looked right in his eyes, but an adult snagged it out of the air instead and I wondered if that was a form of divine judgment, too.
Pete Alonso hit a historic home run. I bought my father a big ice-cream sundae in a baseball hat. After he ate it and the rest of Oliver’s sundae, he began feeling dizzy. His hands turned blue. Kent suggested he put his head between his knees for a little while. The guys in front of us turned around and said they, too, were doctors, if we needed anything. The decision was made to leave in the seventh inning. My father didn’t want to set a bad example for Oliver by leaving early—we were never allowed to go early when I was a kid—but he was tired. And so I drove him back to St. Marks Place, and my mother helped him up the stairs and into the bed with the crisp new sheets.