essay

by Randall Horton

Are You There? Are You There? Are You There?

2:30 am: I awake in the basement of my home in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and realize my cellphone has been ringing back to back. I have missed ten-plus calls from my dad in Birmingham, Alabama. When I answer he begins to speak hurriedly without waiting for my acknowledgment or a hello? I listen intently until I determine he is having a conversation across the decades of his life. Years of experiences and conversations are converging all at once inside his thoughts, rearranging themselves in real time only to repeat the process. I’m trying to follow or find a throughline, a single narration or one close to it. I need something to latch onto, but as I prop myself up on the leather recliner I fell asleep on a few hours earlier, I am failing miserably at this simple task. Dad continues until he abruptly shouts into the phone, “Don’t let them take me to prison!” and at that moment I place myself in the middle of the ongoing tornado inside his thoughts. In his attempted storytelling I am the lead character, the protagonist whose exploits during a particular time are what’s driving his imperative. For some unexplainable reason Dad is confusing my time inside Maryland Department of Corrections and how that extended stay not only intersects with his life, but how it has impacted him over the years to the point he thinks, at this moment in time, he is going to prison, and the only person that can take the witness stand and save him from incarceration is me.

I grew up off Highway 78 close to Arkadelphia Road in the western section of Birmingham, smack in the middle of Dixie Alley (the collective name for areas of the southern United States that are particularly vulnerable to strong violent tornadoes). The one thing I am deeply afraid of in a world in which I try to walk unafraid is a tornado. I have witnessed and lived through the intensity created by these ferocious rotating columns of air. The violent, cyclic wind will uproot the foundation of houses along with pine trees while mowing through green foliage, shredding all material matter into particles that scatter debris and dust across the earth in ways that a return to origin is impossible. When I think about these vitriolic monstrosities I’m imagining a rush of memories unable to reveal a complete theme, bouncing back and forth against my dad’s cerebellum and prefrontal cortex—sideways and then in ropelike swirls against the amygdala and hippocampus. This is the kind of internal chaos I imagine interrupting my dad’s thoughts on a daily basis.

2:35 am: Dad is weaving a story, but the interlacing of language betrays him. Yet he keeps attempting to the point of relentlessness. He will not surrender, though his problem-solving skills refuse a single narration. I place the cellphone on my right thigh while propping my head in my left hand as he continues one long run-on sentence with no period in sight. I now want to reach through the phone and save my dad like he has saved me time after time over the years, but where to begin? Maybe the early Eighties, sitting inside a Birmingham Police Department precinct on opposite ends of an interview table with him crying and the plainclothes detective between us screaming, “How could you do this to your father?” Two years removed from dropping out of college at the age of twenty-one, I’m sitting on a wooden chair in the interview room looking stupid after stealing business merchandise from my dad to the point he wanted to press charges after threatening me with a .38 to the dome. Instead of death or a cell, he attempted to save his only son by placing me in a seven-day drug treatment program. After completing the program my sobriety didn’t last twenty-four hours as the nighttime evaporated me into its fold and I was child of the dark again.

Then too, I could fast-forward to the mid-Nineties, sleeping in a cell at Fairfax County Adult Detention Center where I awaited sentencing the next day for three felony thefts. Sometime after midnight the unit guard rolls back my metal door and informs me I have a visit, which is odd since no one in county gets a jail visit at night, let alone after midnight. I’m thinking it might be the plainclothes detectives who tried to convince me to turn confidential informer until I told them to get me a soft bed and a single cell if I have to do time. I informed the detectives I would rather do my three-year bid before I literally committed suicide to be let back on the streets. Instead, it is my dad sitting at a desk inside an interview room. I take note how the guards call him “Dep.” Turns out the honorary deputy badge my dad received from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office for his community work in the Eighties was his passport to breeze through security with guards referring to him as “Dep,” as in Deputy Horton. While I find this hilarious at best, there is nothing to laugh about as we talk for over an hour about why I am in the county jail about to be sentenced to the Department of Corrections. Just me and my dad inside the county jail after midnight discussing why I am going to prison for three counts of felony theft, the reasons that led me there, and when will I wake up and get my life together? I will never forget the love and concern he showed in that moment. The next day I would be sentenced to three years with eighteen months suspended, with my dad in the gallery as family support.

3:00 am: I am ready to curse dementia for taking my dad without a proper and dignified goodbye. I feel like he is gone, yet he is not. I want to scream, yet I cannot. I keep listening to my dad try to communicate words I will never decipher. Based on his cognitive and functional skills my dad has entered the final stage of dementia. This means he needs constant care.  Months before this phone call, I’d begun to read up on the cause and effects of dementia and came to understand that, according to the CDC, “about 80% of adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias receive care in their homes,” and “approximately two-thirds of dementia caregivers are women.” Within this group of caregivers is my only sister, who has a full-time job and checks on Dad at his home every day after work and sometimes before. I am the one left with sibling guilt, the shame of not living inside my childhood home to take care of someone who took care of me, who believed in me when I could not believe in myself. Even now, on the phone with my dad’s thoughts lost in translation and me staring into a deep void, the guilt is unbearable.

During the early stages of his dementia, no one but Dad believed he was gradually losing his memory. My mother consistently dismissed this notion when he would bring it up. My sister never wanted to talk about matters of sickness and death, so Dad looked to me to believe him. I tried, but I told myself it wasn’t problematic, that any memory slippage was the result of old age. After my mother unexpectedly passed a couple of years ago, Dad began to self-isolate—he was slowly outliving his friends and peers. He didn’t want to venture outside into the world and preferred to stay home and watch old Western reruns. Slowly my sister and I changed and adapted to our dad’s needs, his mannerisms and mood swings. When his motor skills declined to the point he needed a walker, we hired a live-in aide to assist in assuring our dad had a decent quality of life. In my mind we seemed to be in a holding pattern until one day I called him from New Jersey and the struggle to hold a conversation, to remember who I was, it all seemed to happen so fast, but it did not. My sister knew before I did; she just didn’t know how to tell me. My sister and I had been in denial, believing that dementia would not take our dad from us while he was still living. We were oh so wrong.

3:15 am: Dad is still trying to get me to save him from prison. I sink back into that black space of absence, of loneliness while missing his age-earned wisdom. A few years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was he who prepared me for the road to acceptance that I did in fact have cancer, and I could recover. He prepared me for the radiation treatments, the moments cancer would break me down to the point of helplessness, while giving me hope I would overcome the diagnosis. My dad told me prostate cancer didn’t have to be a death sentence, and I believed him because I witnessed him go through the exact same procedures. At this moment I need to tell him about the divorce I am going through in real time, but I cannot. In order to avoid confusing our dad, my sister and I decided it would be best not to complicate his life, so he doesn’t know. I want his counsel, his astuteness, but he is unable to give these things, and to say I feel like yelling into a dark ocean doesn’t do the metaphor justice. These are the sublime thoughts occurring inside my own consciousness while Dad is on the other end battling to create a cohesive sentence, and each time he thinks he has achieved this task, he hasn’t, which is one of the signs of late-stage dementia—as in repeating the same questions, the same set of words, over and over again. Meanwhile, although I’m lost inside my father’s thoughts, I discover comfort inside his soundscape of words, as the kaleidoscopic nature of his voice escorts me to a time I believed my dad to be invincible.

3:45 am: Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Dad again becomes emphatic I have to tell them he didn’t do it. I don’t know who the “them” is, though I assume it is the police or some courtroom he thinks he is in. I want to rescue my dad. I cannot. Then I remember one April in the mid-Seventies he dodged a tornado while driving south on I-59 back from Gadsden to Birmingham during crappie fishing season, which coincides with tornado season in Alabama. He survived to recount the tale of making the split-second decision to pull his car to the side of the road, opening the driver’s-side door and dashing across the front of the car into small ravine with a culvert, which is where he hid to avoid the tornado’s wake of destruction as it barreled north on I-59 toward the Alabama-Tennessee state line. Standing in ankle-deep water he braced the culvert with both hands, the freight-train wind amplified by the open-ended pathway below ground, and then the tornado passed as fast as it came, leaving Dad alive. Again, he repeats Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? and I tell him I never left and never will. He seems satisfied with that answer and says Goodbye. I say I love you, dad. We hang up.

My sister and I are heartbroken when we speak to our ninety-two-year old dad these days. We miss—we need—those unconditional check-ins that always made difficult situations seem so minute in the grand scheme of living a life. My dad saved me from a lifetime of bad decisions and potential prison sentences with his guidance and stewardship, and yet I cannot release him from the bondage of dementia. The only resolve is to allow our dad to live with dignity. Dementia will not take that from my sister and me—until it does.

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Randall Horton (he/him) is a poet, essayist, and creative nonfiction writer born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, who now lives in the Bronx, New York. Horton is the author of #289-128: Poems and Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays. He is the recipient of the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, and two American Book Awards in Poetry and Oral Literature. Horton has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and The Center for Art and Advocacy. His writings have been published in several journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Obsidian, Kenyon Review, Poetry, MS NOW, and Salon. He is professor of English at University of New Haven and executive director of Radical Reversal, a nonprofit organization that installs Interactive Creative Studios inside of departments of correction and youth detention centers.