“WENDYYY! WENDYYY! WENDYYY! WENDYYY!”
“What the Fuck?”, I asked. Wendy looked at me with a humerous grin on her face and says,”Imagine hearing that shit at night when you’re trying to sleep!”
“What’s wrong with him?”, I asked her.
“Is it scaring you?”
“No. It’s just creepy.”
“I don’t think it’s creepy…he just does it to bug.”
I felt compelled to go see what was bothering the old man. His moans and cries sounded like he was in so much pain. Then Wendy says,”I don’t feel sorry for him. Jenny…sometimes I feel like he deserves it. Like, yeah, I feel bad because he’s the one who worked his ass off to get us this house, but he drank so much so it’s his fault that he’s like this now.”
Then she invited me to come with her to see what the old man wanted. She thought it’d be something interesting to do since we were bored, but I didn’t join her right away. I hesitated. Then I heard her kinda laughing at the moans in his room. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say, so I went to see what was so funny.
The moment I stepped in the room I was introduced to the familiar smell of urine that always lurked around the old man, although it wasn’t as bad as it was a few months before. The room looked different. MUCH cleaner. The mattress he slept on, soaked in his own piss and bile, was no longer there. All the stained, soiled clothes had been gotten rid of. All the beer bottles and junk that the old man would pick up off the streets had been replaced by medical equipment.
I looked to the end of the room where Wendy was. She was standing over the the old man…..her mother’s and my step-father’s father, lying in his deathbed.
“Wanna help me put him in his wheelchair?”
I shrugged. I knew how to handle babies, but not his kind. He was so frail, wasting away. A sunken in shroud of skin replaced his beer-belly….delicate ribs held up the rinkled skin. I noticed the big toe on his left foot was missing….and lastly I looked at his face.
The expression on it……it made me want to cry. Nearly bald, empty eyes that sunk in, cheekbones so visible and the light reflected off the spit around his mouth and saliva dribbling down the side of his cheek. The last time I had seen him he was still walking the streets, from Lincoln Park to Alhambra, pushing his shopping cart he stole from Target, collecting beer bottles and soda cans to take them to the recycling center and spend the money on beer.
“You don’t have to help me if you don’t want to”, Wendy says, snapping me out of the memory.
“I don’t know” I looked at the feeding tube attached to his stomach. Wendy pulled the wheelchair next to his bed. “Is it hard?”
“I don’t know. This is my first time. I’ve seen my uncles do it. It doesn’t look so hard.”
“You’ve never done this before?!…I don’t think you should…” and I shut up because she was already trying to lift him up. She doesn’t have the strength to lift him up so I put my hands on his back and pushed. His urine tube got stuck on the side of the bed and she let go.
“This isn’t gonna work”, she realizes.
“I didn’t think so.”
She tied his hands back up to the metal bars on the sides of his bed. He had a habit of trying to pull the tubes out to let himself die.
I felt so sorry for my…..step-grandfather. The room was so hot. I had felt the sweat on his back, and he had been covered with a blanket. I wanted to wipe my hands, but everything in the room smelled like piss and no fuckin way was I gonna wipe them on myself. I could’ve washed my hands in the bathroom, but I was too dumbstruck at his appearance to move away from his side.
Then Wendy got an idea. She ran to her room and came back with one of her girly magazines…..Vogue, I think it was….and she flipped the pages to the spreads of the models in bikinis,”Look Grampa!”
All of a sudden his painful mumbling and grumbling turned into inquisitive oooh’s and aaah’s. I heard “oOOOOOhhhh…” gurgle out of his throat and we knew how pleased he was to see what he saw. I wanted to laugh, but his reaction to the near naked women surprised me too much. Wendy, on the other hand, was laughing her ass off….
….and then she got an even BETTER idea! “JENNY! YOUR PLAYBOY!”
“It’s upstairs. In my backpack.”
“Go get it!”
So I ran upstairs, to the house my stepdad and his brother shared, grabbed my backpack and brought it back down to Wendy’s room where she came to eagerly grab it out of my notebook, and back to Grampa’s room we went. She flipped straight to the ones who showed the most tits, pussy, and ass, and put it right in his face. His eyes seemed to glaze over with delight.
She untied his hands, sympethising, he was trying to hold the Playboy up to his face with his own two withered, shaky, old hands. He began to mumble to her once again and she understood everything. “HAHAHA! He’s asking me where his boxes of old porno’s are! I Told him I took them. What a dumb-ass! He said ‘why’ when he never took anything from me. I said ‘YES YOU DID!'”
After awhile that got boring. We went back to her room….closing Grampa’s door behind us. “Jenny, wasn’t that funny? Why did you look so sad? You looked so depressed in there. Don’t feel bad….I don’t. The way I see it, he got what he deserved.”
“I’m not sad. It WAS funny.”
“Then why the fuck weren’t you busting up in there?”
“I was just….surprised…I guess. I didn’t know he had it in him.”
“You look so sad though.”
“Na man. Just thinkin.”
I felt horrible. What I had just witnessed was disgusting. I’ll be the first to say that I WOULD have been laughing as much as Wendy was, probably would’ve found it twice as funny……IF!……if I didn’t know what I knew about him.
I remember the days when Grampa was a “sane” man. When he’d hold up my little brother and call him his “Little Bambino” and the days when he could remember people’s names. Day’s when he could still keep himself clean.
I was disgusted by the way that everything that made him who he was died….no…one thing was spared. His perverse nature.
I thought back…..and…..why didn’t Grampa ever pat me on the head and leave me alone? He couldn’t. He was a pervert. He’d take me into THAT room…..his room….he’d sit me down on his lap……he’d unzip himself while I was sitting there and he’d pull his hardness out in between my legs. My mother had dressed me in a sundress, so he took advantage and rubbed himself against my panties….so easily accessable. I didn’t like it….and it confused me. But I thought it was just another one of those “Big Girl” moments. Another one of those things that I had to do to be able to become a big girl…a good girl. So I sat there…..and just like I did all the other times, I waited. I waited for my moment to get away. Waited for someone to call my name, which was the perfect excuse to stop the “big girl test”.
“MELLIIII!”, my MOM! I jumped off his lap to answer her call….like a good girl. After that I learned to stay away from Grampa so I didn’t have to do “that” again……I was four.
It’s been thirteen years……and now there he was……on his deathbed. More dead than alive…..and I come to find that what lives is the pervert. Yes…it is……alive…..and WELL.
I can’t help feeling sorry for the old fool. And I couldn’t pin all the hate on him if I tried. He wasn’t the first. He wasn’t the last.
But I can’t help feeling sorry for the old fool.
He’ll die soon and what he took from me will go with him. Yeah, the old bastard got a last taste of what he loved most. His precious pussy……
……I’ll see him in Hell.