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Blood Thick

Alone in his car, driving South on the New Jersey Turnpike on this Sunday morning, he could not stop his mind from racing. Childhood memories flooded his thoughts. Before one episode had run it’s course, another one vividly rose up in his minds eye to replace it. He was in a trance like state. In just an hour or so, he would see a father he had neither seen nor spoken to for over fifteen years.

They were never very close. George, his Father, owned a small grocery store, which, to make ends meet, kept it’s doors open for business even on weekends. Conner was the younger of two children. Brian, his older brother by two years, seemed to receive all the little attention George could spare.

Their mother, Harriet, spent the majority of her time in bed. When the boys were very young, they believed those who told them that that she was not a well woman. But as they grew up, they came to realize that it was the booze that kept her laid up for such long stretches of time.

As is not so uncommon with neglected children such as Conner, he fell in with a bad crowd. Like his mother, alcohol would prove to be at first his panacea, and eventually the main ingredient in his great downfall.

His troubles with the law began at the young age of fourteen. Drinking and drugging with friends, they hot-wired a car for the sake of a joyride. Of course, Conner insisted on driving. The attention that he lacked at home made him crave to be the center of attention under all circumstances. Luckily for him, the car that he smashed into going eighty miles per hour down the narrow suburban streets was unoccupied. Even luckier still, no one in the car was seriously injured. But the cops arrived, and the incident proved to be just the beginning of Conner’s great familiarity with the interior of police stations.

At the age of thirty six, Conner was convicted of the crime of possession of an illegal substance with the intention to distribute it. He served five years of an eight year sentence before he was paroled. He went back to his parents house afterwards to contemplate his future.

Needless to say, his father was not happy with this move. He considered Connor to be a completely lost cause, and made it very clear to him that he was not welcome in his home. One week, that’s it, George told him, and after that, if he didn’t leave of his own volition, he would physically throw his youngest son’s sorry ass out of the house.

When the week was up, Connor had been drinking the previous night, and had passed out on the living room sofa. When George came downstairs that morning, he went directly to the sofa with the intention of removing him from the house. But Connor had grown strong in prison, and as soon as he awoke from his slumber and realized exactly what was occurring, he quite easily overpowered his aging father. When Connor finally let go of George, his father disappeared into the kitchen, and Connor resumed his position on the sofa.

Within about fifteen minutes, police sirens could be heard. When George opened the front door for them to enter, he proceeded to file a complaint against his youngest son. Being that this was a violation of his parole, Connor was immediately hauled away and sent back to prison, to serve out the remaining three years of his original jail sentence.

His mother, Harriet, passed away within a week of this episode. Connor was permitted to attend her funeral, and was greatly surprised when he spotted his father crying hysterically as they lowered her casket into the ground.

That was the last time he had set eyes upon his father.

During the intervening years, Conner had, remarkably, cleaned up his act. He began to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in prison, and upon his release from jail found employment as a counselor in a drug rehabilitation facility. He married a co-worker he had met at the rehab center where he worked, and was now a very proud father of three magnificent children.

Over the years, he had renewed his relationship with his older brother, Brian, who, after a successful career in real estate, had semi-retired and was now residing in Florida.

But with his prior anger and bitterness for the most part purged from his system, Connor could never find within himself the ability to forgive his father. The day he was sent back to prison, he had sworn on the Bible in his cell room that he would never again speak to the man he would henceforth only call by his first name, George.

Until today, he had kept to his oath.

Brian had informed him of his father’s cancer some months ago. At the time, nothing was mentioned of George’s desire to see his youngest son. But this morning, when his older brother called, he told Conner that their father was dying, his body ravaged by the disease. He had refused to enter a hospice, saying he’d rather die in his own bed. And then Brian told him something that truly shook him. He said that, with the last ounce of strength that remained in their father’s voice, he had besieged him to contact his younger brother, that his dying wish was to see Conner once more before he passed on.

George was living in a run down cottage by the ocean in Atlantic City. When Conner finally located the address, he sat in his car in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. He lingered there for quite a while, attempting to prepare himself for what he was about to experience. He pictured George in his minds eye, all shriveled up, skin and bones. Brian had told him that he was taking huge amounts of morphine, but still the pain was more than unbearable. What perplexed him the most was that when Brian offered to rush to the airport, suggesting to their father that he could be by his bedside within the same time frame as Conner, George had requested that he not do so. That, in the end, he wanted to be alone with Conner.

The front door was unlocked. As he entered the house, there were two things that immediately caught his attention.

First, there was the smell of death. It was the same odor he had sensed when the man in the adjacent cell to him in prison had hung himself in the middle of the night, his body not being discovered till the following morning.

And the picture hanging above the wall directly above the same old sofa that used to sit in their living room while he was growing up. It was a large, framed, black and white picture of Conner. He must have been around the age of nine or ten when it was taken. He just stood there for a while, staring at it, thinking the old man must have gone senile quite a while ago.

As he entered his father’s bedroom, he was struck by how accurately he had pictured his father’s face while he was sitting in his car outside the house. George was hooked up to an intravenous machine, feeding him liquid nourishment and morphine. As Connor approached the bed, his father’s eyes, which had previously been closed shut, suddenly opened wide. Conner noticed some form of life force suddenly sweep over his father.

Meekly, his father waved him closer. When Conner was standing right next to him, his father motioned that he wanted to whisper something in his ear. Bending down, his father said, “lie down besides me. Listen, but please don’t talk.”

Conner did as his dying father asked. He laid down right beside him, their bodies touching, in order for Conner to position his ear up against George’s lips.

“I love you, Conner. You have no idea. Neither did I. When I thought I hated you, it was myself I was really hating. You were the spitting image of me, and I don’t just mean looks wise. I am going to meet my Maker. I have come to forgive myself for almost everything. But you, Conner, I cannot forgive myself for how I treated you. I beg your forgiveness, my sweet boy. If you accept my apology, just squeeze my right hand.”

With tears dripping down his face, Conner gripped his Father’s right hand and squeezed it strongly.

With this action, the soul of Conner’s Father left the physical confines of his earthly body.

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