Perry Cox

PenPatronus

Story #13:

A Conversation with Laverne

It was midnight when Perry Cox finally lifted his eyes and saw what he'd been walking towards. He'd left the apartment two hours before. The argument he and Jordan had gotten into had climaxed with Perry actually raising his hand and beginning to swing it, before he'd stopped himself. And when he'd looked past Jordan he'd seen his son Jack peeking out of his bedroom door with terrified tears in his eyes.

In that terrible moment, Perry saw himself through his son's eyes. And remembered his father through his own.

He knelt in front of Laverne Roberts' tombstone and rapped his knuckles against it as though it were a door. "Hey! Open up in there! I've got something to say to you!" Grass had begun to grow overtop the grave, and month-old bouquets of flowers lay bleached and wilted. "Laverne!" Perry called. He raised the Scotch he'd carried with him and jiggled the bottle. "If you come out and play, I'll share!"

"What I want to say," Perry began after his request was not heeded, "is that you had a hell of a lot of nerve lecturing me about how everything happens for a reason and then going out and getting yourself killed. I mean come on, how does that help your argument? You're a decent human being, and there are a whole lot of indecent human beings still out there! And if all this was meant to teach me a lesson, well, I guess I'm a slow learner because I don't get it!" Perry hopped back up to his feet, swayed drunkenly for a moment, and then began to walk in circles around Laverne's grave.

"So what's the almighty purpose of this, huh? What's the point of your cold dead body rotting in the dirt? Where's the reason in good people dying and bad people triumphing—I don't get it!" he said again, to the tombstone, and then again with a shout towards to the starry sky. Perry took a deep breath and monitored that breath as it entered his lungs, his blood, his brain. It didn't make him feel better. The stars were as silent as the bones beneath his feet.

"Don't tell anyone, Laverne, but the reason why I hate Hugh Jackman so much is because he looks like my father. Same jaw line, same posture, same grumpy voice… My dad is buried somewhere back in Philadelphia. He should've died back when I was fifteen but, no, I watched him collapse from a heart attack and what did I do? Dumb ass fifteen-year-old Perry improvised CPR. I breathed life back into him—and you want to know what he said when he woke up in the hospital? The jackass—he said "Percival, I hear you missed five out of six of your foul shots last game." Did he say gee thanks, son, for saving my life? Nope. Did he say he was sorry for missing all of my games, that he had a new found love for life and that from then on he would spend time with me and Paige and stop bashing our mother's nose in? Nope." Perry took a long swig of Scotch and winced as it slithered down. "What was the point of that, huh? Was the point of saving my father's worthless life that he could just make my mom and sister and me feel worthless for another dozen years?"

Perry kicked the tombstone once, twice, three times with his left foot and then took another round with his right.

"God Almighty! I know what you're thinking, Laverne, I know what you're going to say: "Dr. Cox, your father wasn't meant to die then! You were fulfilling God's will when you saved him. You probably don't know it but maybe your dad gave all of his extra money to orphans and he secretly adopted starving kids in Africa and rescued kittens from trees. And maybe you wouldn't of become a doctor if not for that experience." Well, Laverne, that's bullshit. He spent Paige's lunch money on booze and my college savings on hookers. And I became a doctor to make all that money back. My dad was nothing more than a waste of space and oxygen and believe you me the world is better off without him…And it would probably be better without me…"

Perry looked down at the grave, at his shoeprints in the grass and the layer of mud that now covered Laverne's tombstone. "Dammit." Cox knelt down and swiped the mud off with his bare hands. He poured the rest of the bottle of Scotch on it and used both palms to scrub and wipe until Laverne's gravestone was clean again. "Sorry," he muttered to it. "As usual I take my shit out on whoever's around me. And unfortunately I'm better at talking to the dead than I am to the living." Perry sat down on the grassy grave and leaned back against the stone, looking up at the stars through the tree limbs.

"Maybe…try this one on for size, Laverne…maybe the point of my father's life was to show people what not to do. But, if that's the case, I didn't learn because I almost hurt Jordan tonight! I almost became exactly the man—exactly what my father was, and I almost gave my son the lousy childhood I had…Almost. How…how much is the "almost" worth, Laverne?"

Perry was silent for awhile. Nearly an hour. The smell of spoiled Scotch mixed with whatever chemical the cemetery lawn was being treated with and Jesus, was it rancid.

How much is the "almost" worth? How much is it worth? Is "almost" worth the same as "never?" Is thinking just as bad as doing? Is raising a fist to Jordan just as bad as hitting her with it?

"Let me ask you something, Laverne," Perry continued, but now in a whisper. "Let's say that you and Gandhi and Paige are right and there really is a god and a heaven and a reward for this lousy life. Let's say that at the end of all this I'll look back and realize it was worth it. Can you honestly tell me—promise me—that this hell is worth that heaven? Can you prove it to me?"

Perry Cox waited patiently for her answer. He waited until he fell asleep, right beside Laverne. And he was still waiting when his pager woke him up in the morning.