Leaving by Degrees

Leaving by Degrees

A Novel By

NEIL HETZNER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 by Neil Hetzner

All Rights Reserved.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my readers Martha Day, Lea Renfro, Jeni Martin, Doris Rutz, who knew some of the story before I did, and, especially, Larry Rothstein for some very astute editing.

Chapter 1

MAY 2012

With a tetch of embarrassment that focused on whether there might be a camera watching, seventy-two year old Duff Elgin gave in to the urge and for a fourth time lifted the sheet that covered the lower half of his body. The sight that piqued his interest had triggered thoughts of days long past, graduate school days, days when he and a dozen other overwhelmed botany doctoral students would say the hell with it and take a day off. With a maxima of beer and hotdogs and a minima of charcoal and dishes, they would gather at the Fenton Shelby State Forest picnic area to raise their blood alcohol levels and lower their inhibitions. The older students would command a first year to watch the coal bed and turn the grill baskets that held the hotdogs. Invariably there would be a philosophically deep but never resolved discussion of why hotdogs came in packages of ten, buns came eight to a package, and grill baskets held just six dogs. Had research been done that indicated there would be a 40% hotdog and 25% bun attrition rate from opening a package to getting them off the grill and into someone’s mouth? Who knew? They had been doctoral students, not marketing geniuses.

The budding scientists would down beers, swim and, later, piss in a murky cattail bordered pond, play a rule-free form of volleyball and engage in violent, invective-laced badminton matches. They would get blotto drunk and serially curse and damn each and every one of their major professors. Invariably, bleary but blissful, as they packed up their gear to return from the pleasures of town to the tortures of gown, someone would discover a forgotten hotdog left trapped in a darkened grill basket.

It was that image that had caused Duff to lift the sheet to stare at his forlorn penis trapped inside a urologist’s version of a hot dog grill basket. Duff wished that his phone wasn’t in the right pocket of his khakis, which were hanging on a clothes hook in the small, misnamed dressing room. He thought that he would like to have a picture of what he was observing. He could Photoshop it and send it as a birthday card to his former fellow graduate students and current professor emeriti celebrating the endless joys of end of life.

Elgin lowered the sheet, put one hand behind his head to augment the peedy pillow that had been provided and used his free hand to pick up the book he had been reading as he waited for the doctor—The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a socialist tract wrapped inside a Dickensian-flavored novel. A minute later he let the book rest on his chest as he considered the last forty-three minutes: Being escorted by a twenty-something woman, dressed like a night club hostess, down a featureless ocher-colored hallway. Being led into a room dominated by an examination table and dozens of mayonnaise-colored cryptically labeled drawers: 5 cc 2-way French catheters, red rubber French catheters, 5 cc Coude catheters, needles/syringes, leg bags, Toomey syringes, circumcision kits, and, at last, and somewhat reassuring, gels/lubricants. Being shown a closet-sized room and told to get undressed from the waist down. Covering all of his mottled nakedness with a recalcitrant sheet composed of something that fell somewhere between cloth and plastic. Emerging from the undressing room to be told to hoick himself up on the examining table by the woman who neither dressed like nor acted like someone who belonged in a medical office. Watching as the woman turned away for a moment and then turned back with an enormous white plastic syringe that he had thought would have been more appropriate in a Marx Brothers movie. A syringe so ridiculously large that even as the woman came alongside the examination bed, despite his trepidation, he couldn’t help imagining Groucho in a white jacket, cigar in mouth, stethoscope jiggling around his neck, syringe pointed like a handgun, chasing Harpo, eyes bugged out in horror, around a gurney.

Listening as the woman said, I’m going to numb you and get you ready for the doctor, as she put the syringe down and picked up a pair of doll-sized tongs and cotton pads of a similar scale. Having the tiny tongs and wipes give his penis a cleansing that from his perspective called to mind Lilliputian zoo keepers bathing a miniature elephant’s trunk. Watching in near horror as, a moment after the ablutions were completed, his penis was raised, the syringe was lowered, contact was made and, in a procedure that reminded him of films of an in-flight refueling of a B-52, the fluid transfer was completed.

Blessedly, as with many medical procedures, the actual pain had fallen short of what he had anticipated.

The syringe had disappeared back into the prop drawer. The woman, while holding the urologist’s equivalent of a hot dog grill basket, had explained, I’m going to put your penis in this to keep the medicine in while I go find the doctor. Seconds later, she had click-clacked out the door and he, with penis imprisoned in a grill basket, was reminiscing about graduate school picnics.

Time passed. Pages were turned. A peek was taken. More time passed. More pages were turned. Two more peeks were taken. The hand supporting Duff’s head grew numb. Finally, the woman returned, expressed concern at the length of time his penis was being squished, and removed the basket. However, despite its unexpected freedom, his penis remained inert. Erich Fromm’s provocative thesis in Escape from Freedom came to Duff’s mind.

It was another ten minutes before the doctor, small, bright-eyed, goateed, bustled into the room. The cystostomy was briefly explained—a scope would be threaded through his penis, past his prostate and into his bladder to see what might be causing Duff’s frequent, painful, but meager urinations.

The urologist, improbably but appropriately named Dr. Leakey, whirled around to a five gallon pail filled with a bristle of tubes. While Duff had noticed the bait bucket-sized container when he had reconnoitered the room, he never had considered that it would have anything to do with him. To the extent that he had imagined anything being inserted into his penis, he had imagined something like monofilament fishing line or, at most, something resembling an extremely flexible drink stirrer. In a move that reminded Duff of a priest laving his hands prior to the Offertory, Dr. Leakey presented the bucket to his aide and she anointed the contents with most of a large bottle of what the patient guessed wasn’t holy water. A moment later the doctor was walking toward Duff with what appeared to be, given its length and the large bulb at the end, a walking stick for a jockey.

Alright, let’s see what we’ve got. Take a deep breath.

Duff followed the urologist’s orders and simultaneous with his gulp of air felt a type of pain he had never experienced before. It wasn’t as painful as some dental work that he had endured, but it was disconcerting to learn that, even after seventy-two years of living, his body had yet to be discovered ways of expressing itself.

Jesus.

Duff flicked his eyes in time to see the aide stiffen.

Here’s part of your problem. You’ve got a major blockage in your urethra. If this is a normal urethra, Dr. Leakey joined forefinger to thumb to make a quarter-sized circle, this is yours. The hole shrank to a diameter smaller than a pencil. As the urologist turned back to the bait bucket, he declared, Don’t worry. I’ll fix that.

After more anointing of its contents, the doctor brought the bucket over to the table by the bed and began sorting through the tubes sticking above the rim of the container. I’m going to keep putting bigger and bigger catheters in your penis until the blockage gets broken up. This usually works, but sometimes it just works for a while and I have do it again. Sometimes, not too often, it keeps closing down and we teach you how to do it for yourself.

Although I pride myself on my do it yourself skills, I don’t think ….

Deep breath.

Although with his head at such a low angle that he could accept that his perspective might be thrown off, Duff still thought that more of the tube disappeared into his penis than could possibly be necessary. The pain returned and then increased as the doctor briskly twisted the tube in a way that reminded the patient of an experienced bartender opening a bottle of wine. Elgin thought the sound that accompanied the pain resembled the noise made by someone dragging a finger along a fully inflated balloon.

The doctor’s hand jerked backwards as if pulling a cork from a bottle of wine. A second later he was rummaging through the bucket again. Guessing what was going on, Duff offered, You should color code those by diameter.

For an instant the urologist broke off his fumbling, That’s a good idea. That’s a helluva good idea. I’m never quite sure I’m grabbing the next larger one.

Over the next ten minutes Duff took several more deep breaths. After the fourth, rather than attempting to recoil from what was coming, the retired botany professor’s body relaxed as his mind convinced it to accept the inevitable.

After I get done with you, you’ll be hitting the back of the porcelain.

A moment later Dr. Leakey again picked up the walking stick apparatus. Duff watched as what seemed to be two feet of it disappeared into his body.

Jesus!

On cue, the aide flinched. The urologist raised his eyes to her.

Look at this.

The doctor used one hand to support the scope and his other to bend it down low enough that the aide could peer into its eyepiece. It reminded Duff of assistants holding out microphones to members of a game show audience.

Wow! I always wanted to see one.

Well, you won’t see many bigger.

Changing his focus, Dr. Leakey looked over the top of the scope to Duff. Mr.Ennis.

Elgin.

"Mr. Elgin, you’ve got a bladder stone as big as a golf ball in there. No wonder you’ve been having trouble urinating. I can take care of that. I’ll go in there with a laser and blast it to pieces. It’s got to be a pretty powerful gun because it’s blasting through what’s essentially a rock, but it’s got a short focal point so there isn’t any danger, but, if something does screw up, and I burn a hole in your bladder, I know just what to do.

Okay, Mr. Ennis, we’re going to get you cleaned up; then, you get dressed, come out front, and we’ll get you scheduled. As he whirled toward the door, the urologist mused, Color coded.

That night Duff found a four minute video on YouTube made by a Filipino urologist showing a laser blasting away at a cairn of bladder stones. The spheroid shapes, the violent explosions, and the floating debris reminded him of a climactic scene in a Star Wars movie. The end of the Death Star. During the last few seconds of the video, as the camera panned over a rubble field of shattered stones, Duff Elgin pondered how the debris was to be removed. He did not remember Dr. Leakey saying anything about that. Was the urologist going to be one of those workmen who fixed the problem, but left a mess? Later, as he lay in bed, he imagined a miniature bucket loader offloading scoops of stone fragments into miniature dump trucks, but, given that no one in the urology trade had thought to color code catheters, he guessed the clean-up might be less sophisticated than what he was imagining. He took a deep breath and imagined pissing out chunks of stone through his newly enlarged, but sore and bleeding urethra. When that narrative lost its charm, he imagined standing in the doorway of the small washroom in his barn and hitting the back of the porcelain.

What was harder for Elgin to imagine was who he should ask to drive him to the hospital and wait while his bladder stone was invaded. As a Scotsman he had been raised not to ask for help. Over four decades with his wife Mackie, he had learned that it might be okay to take help occasionally, especially since Mackie had a way of helping that suggested that she was being done the favor. But, Mackie was gone. A tough, smart, vibrant woman had turned to a wisp and been blown away three years before by adrenal cancer.

He might ask one of his former colleagues in the botany department, but it seemed to him that once he retired and was no longer involved in the Baltic states’ politics of his department, those relationships had faltered. He could ask Cody Black, a English professor with whom he had shared many drinks, but it was hard to imagine Black sober enough or not so hungover to be able to get him to the hospital by 6:30 in the morning. He could ask Stubb O’Leary. O’Leary was a local handyman who once had worked with Elgin planting and nurturing the hundreds of lilac bushes he grew on his property. He had shared many a drink with O’Leary. He liked O’Leary and considered him a friend, but he could imagine how much he might fall in O’Leary’s eyes if he were to ask for help. He considered taking a cab, but the thought of what that might cost to get from his house the fifteen miles to the hospital and back was a tough math problem.

For Duff Elgin, it took a little more time than usual to fall asleep.

***

Cody Black, a sixty-seven year old formerly well-regarded novelist and English professor, slowed his pick-up truck as he passed by the entrance to Syringa Farm. With no traffic about, he closed his eyes for a moment so that he could inhale the heady perfume coming from the lilac bushes on his friend Duff Elgin’s land. Even after he was past the farm, which boasted more than three hundred varieties of lilacs, Black continued to inhale deeply like a crack addict pulling the final tendril of smoke from his last rock. Just shy of a false crest on Frostbite Hill, the driver made a sloppy left hand turn onto Albero Lane, a narrow, dead end lane that had three houses, each on a two acre lot, along its eastern edge. Two thirds of the way up the hill and facing west, the houses provided their owners with sweeping views of Jefferton’s rooftops and steeples, the academic turrets and towers of Jefferton College and the more modern buildings of the university. Far to the west, the soft curves of the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts were covered in newly green forest.

As he slalomed his way along the lane, yanking his steering wheel back and forth trying to avoid the biggest and deepest potholes, Black wondered if his feud with his neighbor Stubb O’Leary could be resolved before his truck was swallowed up like a prehistoric animal in the La Brea tar pits. Was there some action, something diplomatic, political, or physical, which could lead to a negotiated peace? Albero Lane was a private way that the developer, Alberto Legano, had installed without drawing up a maintenance agreement. Without an agreement, after he and O’Leary had fouled up their fractious friendship, the road’s history was like that of an alcoholic descending ever further into Skid Row life. Living in the last house on the lane and driving the most untrustworthy vehicle of the neighborhood, a decade-old miniature Subaru pick-up, Black, despite having been born in the Deep South, hoped for peace and reconstruction.

As the professor passed the white clapboard Colonial next to his own small vinyl-cladded ranch, he was relieved to see that the Perkinson’s yard, an expanse of well-tended lawn highlighted with a half dozen incongruous bald spots, was empty. However, just as he was started to breathe a sigh of relief, his peripheral vision caught movement behind the Perkinson’s screen door. To forestall a visit from Lewis Perkinson, Black sped up, whiplashed the truck into his driveway, hit the remote for the garage, and careened into the area of the garage that remained free of mounds of magazines and middens of plump, ripe garbage bags.

Despite the two hundred eighty-five pounds he carried on his six foot four inch frame, Cody was in his living room spying through a gap in the window blinds no more than fifteen seconds after the garage door had closed. He watched Lewis Perkinson emerge from his house and study his yard before slowly, disjointedly, walking over to the smallest of the bare spots. For several moments, he stood over that patch of dirt with his arms slightly raised and his fingers spread before slumping to the ground in a way that reminded Cody of a parachute collapsing as it landed. Perkinson’s splayed fingers, looking like small rakes, hovered tentatively before they dropped down and began to pluck tufts of grass from the edge of a bald spot. After several minutes of watching, while multiple strands of emotion entangled themselves in his mind, Black retreated from the window and shifted his attention to the half empty bottle of Weller 12 Year glowing on the coffee table.

Three hours later a lumbering Cody Black banged his hip and added a new bruise to the old ones as he extricated himself from the ancient leather club chair that dominated his living room and made his way to his bedroom. Once he was safely in his bed, Black took the few minutes before he began snoring to ponder whether the words he had just written about Robert E. Lee were incisive fact-based fiction or just more worshipful words added to the slew of Lee hagiography.

When Black awoke the next morning he found a squall of scrawled pages littering his living room floor. Despite his hurting head and guilty heart, he smirked that despite being in a black-out, he once again had channeled the expansive ghost of Thomas Wolfe. He couldn’t remember what he had written, but, it was obvious he had written something … seemingly a lot of something.

***

While seventy-two year old Lewis Perkinson watched their cat Zinger stalk his new toy, Lena Perkinson, eleven years his senior, watched her husband of forty years. His cheeks were smooth; his hair was combed; his eyes were bright with interest at the cat’s antics. She knew, if she drew close, his breath would be minty.

Earlier that day Lewis, with Lena’s assistance, had spent a half hour at ImPETuous selecting a new treat for Zinger. After much consideration, but, thankfully for Lena, with only a minimum of frustrated moaning, Lewis had picked a ball, four inches in diameter, which was made from bamboo strips. Imprisoned inside the ball was a furry catnip-filled mouse spinning on an axle. The mouse constrained inside its bamboo sphere reminded Lena of da Vinci’s sketches of a man circumscribed by a circle.

Knowing how their cat held unassailable views on what was and wasn’t an entertaining toy, Lena was relieved that as soon as Lewis had rolled the mouse sphere across the floor, Zinger had pounced. Because the cat was engaged, Lewis was engaged, and because Lewis was engaged, Lena, although not free, could, to a small extent, disengage.

***

Having drunk too fast, Cody Black now was driving too fast with reflexes too slow. As he caromed off Frostbite Hill Road and barreled down Albero Lane, he hit a pot hole that he had warned himself he must not hit. As the front left wheel dropped down eight inches, the steering wheel ripped free from the driver’s benumbed fingers. The sudden deceleration threw Black forward. His chest smashed the steering wheel as his foot smashed the accelerator. The motor made a high-pitched sound that more resembled a dirt bike’s whine than a truck’s engine. After a moment of shrieking, the truck managed to escape the clutches of the pothole. It suddenly shot off at a right angle and lunged down Black’s walkway. The professor’s size fourteen shoe stomped the brake pedal with the fury of a skinhead at a peace demonstration. The truck stopped just shy of Black’s front step.

Flailing like a scuba diver trying to shed his wet suit, Black wriggled free of the truck. The adrenaline that had been released during his adventure was sufficient to clear enough alcohol from his brain to realize that the truck would need a new tire and the front lawn would need Stubb O’Leary.

***

Despite the trouble he had been having with his left knee over the previous four days, Stubb O’Leary only hesitated for a second before he began climbing the twenty-four foot ladder resting against the gutter at the front of his house. A late March storm had caused his chimney cap to come loose. In the two months since the storm, three squirrels, like small sharp-toothed Santas, had come tumbling down O’Leary’s chimney looking for a rodent’s equivalent of milk and cookies.

The feet of the sixty-five year old lean, hard-muscled landscaper and handyman were two rungs shy of allowing him to climb onto the steeply pitched roof of his snug, two bedroom cape when his left knee refused to take any more weight.

O’Leary was working his way through his safest options for getting back down using just one leg when he heard the whimper and buzz of Cody Black’s truck. Twisting his body around, the landscaper watched with satisfaction as the professor’s little truck, sporting a donut on the driver’s side, bounced up and down his section of the lane like the last kernel in a popcorn popper. To avoid any possible interaction, O’Leary turned back to face his house.

The landscaper became irritated when he heard the truck pull into his driveway. He turned to watch Black use both of his hands to fight his massive body free of the cab.

Having escaped the truck’s clutches, Black cocked his head as he lumbered toward the ladder.

You going up or coming down?

O’Leary dipped his stubbled chin.

Good. Look, O’Leary, I know you don’t want to talk about the lane, and right now I don’t either. It’s my yard I want to talk about. That and my garage.

When Black paused, O’Leary knew it was in anticipation of him making his way down the ladder. However, doing something that had a chance of appearing ridiculous was not something he felt like doing in front of his neighbor.

So talk.

Landsy, O’Leary, with you up there and me down here, if Miss Perkinson looks out her window, she’ll think I’ve got you treed. C’mon down.

Holding tight to the rungs to keep his weight off his gimpy leg, O’Leary ventured down one step. Once his weight was on his good leg, he shifted his hands.

Cody watched the tortured descent down to the last rail before commenting, Mercy, O’Leary, if you’re as crippled as you appear, maybe I better find someone else to do my yard.

The landscaper nodded in a way that indicated he had anticipated Black’s sentiments. Suit yourself, he said as he limped toward his front door.

Black hesitated. He liked both the price and the quality of the work that Stubb O’Leary had done for him in the past, but with a lecture to give for which he wasn’t well-prepared and a