Little Voice

Here's the situation and grim doesn't begin to describe it:

I've just found out that my dad is dying fast and although The Good Doctor has told me that he thinks Dad's got as many as five days to live, I just don't see him lasting much past three. It's Thursday afternoon, and just five days ago, on Saturday, we were all sitting at the dinner table together at my parent's house. Since then he's gone into the hospital, deteriorated, spiraled, and now we're breaking him out of the joint to take him into hospice care at our family's summer home at the Jersey shore. So, to recap: In five days he's gone from a man feeling not quite himself, eating a sandwich at a dinner table, to a man unable to walk, strapped onto a gurney, with the knowledge that he's got a few days to live nestling into his psyche. And my head is about to explode.

It's an hour and a half drive south to the beach and Mom will be riding in the ambulance with Dad. Since we've all descended from different points on the map, everyone-- both sisters, my brother-in-law and me-- will each be taking one of four separate cars. And everyone's left. I'm last to leave.

Now, for reasons too tedious to go into, I'm driving my beat-up, second car-- the station car-- with a near empty gas tank. It's a twenty-year-old manual shift junker that I adore madly, but it's seen better days. There are no airbags because they weren't mandatory back then, and there's no right rear view mirror, because they were optional at the time. Optional! There's no AC or FM radio, no lighter and not a single computer chip to be found. The car is totally off the grid and looks it. There are bumper stickers of varying degrees of irony and a bit of a side swipe-y looking dent over one of the back fenders. It's a work horse of a four speed with manual windows and manual steering that got me back and forth safely across country and through years of parallel parking in Boston, San Francisco and L.A., but, let's face it, it's a glorified golf cart.

And it's out of gas.

Then. For reasons involving the chasing down of nurses, doctors and hospice coordinators in the ICU, and the magazine article Mom read once years ago about hospital theft, my wallet is in my mom's purse. My mom is in the ambulance with my dying dad and the ambulance has left. I have to get my car out of the hospital garage, pay for parking and put gas in the car with no money. And I'm crying pretty hard. Nope, scratch that. I'm probably crying harder than I ever have in my life. This is a pre-verbal cry of such depth and anguish, that I don't feel exactly human. We've held it together for five, long, dizzying days, and now, with no more information to leech out of anyone, no patient to advocate on behalf of, and no loved ones to hold it together for, I've lost it.

I'm rolling down the window to tell the nice shift worker in the little garage tollbooth that I have no money to pay the seven bucks for the garage. She manages to decipher what she can from the hysterical gasps and sobs coming from the crazy, sallow-eyed lady in the little, blue shit-heap and waves me through saying, "Drive carefully."

Now that I've cleared that hurtle, there's the problem of gas. I'm thinking, thinking. Every one's left. I guess I could have gone back into the hospital and ask one of the nurses for ten bucks, but I didn't think of that at the time. I considered driving directly to a gas station and asking the pleasant, swarthy, foreign man who seems to manage every gas station in New Jersey now, if he'd give me some free gas. Honestly, he might not give two hoots. I just couldn't be sure how the sympathy card might be received across cultural boundaries or how much fudge factor a small business owner has to play with at the pump. On this day of all days, I couldn't chance it.

I know, I thought, I'll ask some stranger for money. Over the years I'd handed cash to strangers. Maybe some one would hand some to me.

There was the midwestern looking mom and her teenage daughter who I noticed crying to a cop in Times Square once. I walked up to the mom, asked if I could help, handed her forty bucks, and smiled and walked away. There were the three other people I shared an uptown cab with the day of the black out. They were low on dough and I'd just been to the ATM so I handed them each twenty bucks, just in case. In seventeen years of living in New York City I'd lost my wallet three times and each time it was returned to me with everything in it. I felt I'd seen the magic of money karma at work in my midst and that there must be some errant pixie dust floating around somewhere, perhaps in my glove compartment. So I looked around.

A man in a dark suit was about to cross just in front of me. Bingo! I thought. If this guy is in a suit, there's a good chance he's employed. He looked like a pharmaceutical rep; mid- forties, maybe not the countenance of a super benevolent guy, but not the look of a total jerk, either. I wiped my pink, puffy eyes, tucked my greasy hair behind my ears, brought my sobs down a notch and craned my head out the window.

"Excuse me, Sir," I said, "you look like you have money."

My god. Can you imagine? I could have said, "I hate to trouble you, Sir," but no. I said, "You look like you have money," like he's from an old, New England family. Like some pick up line from the Great Gatsby. And if you've forgotten what kind of shape I'm in or what kind of car I'm driving, re-read the above. I'm a blithering mess. But I have gotten his attention. He walks towards me with a slightly pained look on his face-- the kind of face I make when someone asks me if I have a moment to take a brief survey.

I stammer. "I'm s-so sorry to ask, Sir, b-but my muh-om's in the am-bu-lance with my f-father and she's g-got my wah-hallet and I'm-m out of gas and, he's d-dying, and I'm-m s'posed to f-follow and could I puh-please have t-ten dollars?"

He glances down at my ridiculous car and my wet cheeks and bleary eyes and his furrowing eyebrows say to me, Really, lady? I don't have time for this. Are you serious? Can this really be what they're teaching in Small Con School these days? But he's reaching for his wallet-- albeit slowly and with a look of achy, quasi-resolve-- so I continue.

"I just nee-ed enough to g-get me an hour and a half-f down the parkw-way. Ten dollars sh-should be enough."

He hands me a five.

I nearly laughed. 'Th-thank you s-so much," I said, "thank you, Sir, th-thank you." He gestured meagerly and I drove off. And I gotta tell ya, it cracked me up. It actually made me smile. For a brief moment in an otherwise dark, forbidding stretch of time, I had to laugh at the guy who thought, Yeah, what the hell, I'll give this dame some money, but I'm sure as hell not giving her ten bucks. She'll take five and like it. Jeeze, I gotta be crazy. Women, today. Criminy.

So I drove to the station and put gas in my car and made it all the way down to the shore where I joined my family in helping my father die; which he did, incidentally, a day and a half later. And I couldn't have done it without that surly guy, in the navy blue suit, who didn't really want to help me, but did anyway. He'll always be part of the motley cast of characters that made that incredible week even more surreal that I ever could have imagined. And the next time I'm at a dive bar I'll order a cold Pabst in a can and toast to the little voice inside that man that kicked his ass into leaving the trajectory of his morning, to walk over to a shit-heap of a car, where he took one look, pried open his wallet, and spotted some hysterical broad a fin.