Red Dog

Essay

By Jen Girdish
Published: March 30th, 2006 | 9:37pm

My father lives just off of the only red dog road left in Washington County. A clay-like by-product of smoldering coals in the slag piles, red dog was once used to pave roads in Western Pennsylvania. The name comes from the color. The Pennsylvania Conservation State Commission deemed red dog an illegal road base because it “easily crumbles under pressure,” and the road that lines the end of my father’s 40 acres ripples and dips, catching the underside of my car every time. This is the land my father seems to understand.

The Pittsburgh Veterans Affairs Hospital holds court on the upper campus of the University of Pittsburgh, overlooking the skeletal remains of the old Panther football stadium and the nestled valley of undergraduates below. It’s about an hour and a half trip from the red dog road, and when my father makes that trip in the VA shuttle van, he takes a mild sedative so the cars and the horns and the unpredictable lurch of traffic won’t give him another heart attack.

It was a fluke that my father signed up for a VA healthcare plan several years ago. Last year the budget was cut significantly, and the program was forced to stop enrolling new patients. The hospital around him is breaking and fighting off decay. The nurse comes in to scan his paper bracelet, but the scanner doesn’t work. The best thing you can say about the food is the twice-baked potato.

In the hospital he wears a uniform that resembles scrubs. Burgundy, with snaps down the front of the shirt and draw string pants. "VA Property—Not For Sale" runs across his chest. His legs are shaved and peek out as he crosses and uncrosses them in bed.

It is difficult to talk during the entire visiting hours from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. so we slump into silence and rely on the white TV that extends over his bed like an arm to pass the time. The primetime television that ran when I was young is now, 20 years later, running during the day time. It’s comforting, we already know what happens. Magnum PI, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Cosby. We watch a James Bond marathon, and he schools me in the difference between each Bond, and how strange it will be to have a blonde shooting at the commies.

I don’t know what it is about hospitals that make you think that patient should always stay in bed. I wince every time my father gets up. As if heart surgery makes him more likely to trip over something on the way to the bathroom.

He likes the doctors to go in with a joke. He doesn’t respect a doctor who can’t, or refuses, to tell a joke. But only the nurses tell jokes. The doctors have straight faces and tight lips, especially the surgeons. If they would just crack a joke, my father says, he could get through it.

How the doctors explain it instead is that my father’s heart is becoming the consistency of a Coke bottle, where it should be more like a soft hose. His heart is becoming calcified, morphing into bone. Literally, my father has a hard heart.

His mitral valve, the one that pumps the blood out of the heart, is giving out, but his heart is too calcified to operate. There is a 50% chance that during surgery, a piece of the coke-bottle heart would break off and travel straight up the artery to his brain, causing a stroke. He’s already had a stroke, but the doctor assures us this is a different kind of stroke, with a substantial risk of brain damage.

They tell us six months and file out of the room to leave us to our grieving. But this is something my father and I have been auditioning for, this expiration date. His coke-bottle has been giving out for the last twenty years. This is what estranged daughters and fathers are good at, dramatic reconciliation and regret. It’s the small talk where we come up short.

His nurse practitioner could be a gentile Barbara Streisand. She can tell a joke. He dusts off his manners for her. She is charmed, as you would be, had you met my father. He persuades her to tell him that his coke-bottle heart has nothing to do with cigarettes. I’m not sure how he gets her to do this. My father has a way of making people say anything to console him. He gets her to concede that it could have something to do with the lime in the spring water on his property. It could have to do with his diet, his genes. He mentions that he lives on a red dog road, and he asks if the silicate in the rock could have anything to do with his heart. The practioner looks as if she has reached her threshold of niceties, that’s an interesting theory.

The patients at VA are retired steel workers and miners. They have aged considerably over their lifetime. And they are all men. My father sends me downstairs for a cup of decaf and waiting for the elevator I am ogled by at least a handful of these cantankerous men who have IVs trailing after them. I never really knew men like this. My mother tried to keep me from them. Not because of their professions but because they smoked too much and cussed and probably once had apartments with milk curdling in the refrigerator. These are like men my father grew up with, and they all seem to be dying early, here in this hospital. Their hearts are giving out, kidneys dried. They are like their professions, out of date.

These are just notes without any formal structure. Because after he is gone, he will be a character, he will become a sum of his flaws and affections that I have whittled down to fit. Details are sifted, thoughts eroded down to their essentials and then amplified as truths. Distance creates perspective. Perspective creates nostalgia. I will tell people he looked like Elvis. He looked like Johnny Cash. He smoked like Moskowitz in that Cassavettes film. His heart was like a coke bottle. With distance and perspective he will become like and as.

Here is the truth. He wears a weathered digital watch on the inside of his left wrist. He shoots groundhogs from his second-story dining room window when they dig holes in his front lawn. He drinks four light beers after breakfast and goes back to sleep. He once coerced a man to deliver a horse to my front door on Christmas morning. His curtains are the color of nicotine. He taught me how to drive his standard Ford Bronco on the red dog.

Here is the truth. He always goes in with a joke.

Jen Girdish is a freelance writer living in Washington, DC. She is currently studying creative nonfiction at Lesley University's MFA program.