Then he coughs again and says, “I used to have time for everybody, no matter who—and that was with half this town in my pocket,” and I know what kind of day I’m in for.

He wouldn’t let me drive him to the doctor’s, the first time he went. He drove himself, then called me six hours later from the hospital. They’d wanted to run some more tests and had moved him over there in an ambulance—”just to jack up the fucking price.” When I asked him what kind of tests, he said, “The regular kind.” He told me to take a cab to the doctor’s office and bring home his Cadillac.

Two days later a male nurse knocked on our door with a plastic briefcase and a canister of oxygen. My father didn’t look surprised, and I knew then that he’d decided he wasn’t going to tell me whatever the tests had revealed. Not that it was any great mystery. He’d been smoking two packs of Winstons a day since he was sixteen. Over the years, he’d been a big fan of beer and red wine and bourbon, progressively. At fifty, he’d replaced all that with coffee, and he averaged five, six pots a day. He liked eggs, he liked steak, he liked pasta, and he liked iceberg lettuce; nearly everything else he eyed with suspicion, except for snack foods and what he baked himself. As a result, by the time he reached his fifty-seventh birthday, he had an enormous, almost perfect semicircle of a stomach attached to his small frame, and a pair of lungs that could barely move it around. His neck looked inflated and his head had gone the way of Sinatra’s, as if the original skull had been replaced with a larger model. The caffeine infusions, combined with his constant need for a nicotine fix, wrecked his sleep pattern, and he’d taken to napping in shifts, three or four hours at a time, so that he was usually just waking up or about to go to bed. The walk from the front door to the end of the driveway and back to get the newspaper—a distance of some fifty feet, round-trip—left him not only winded but exhausted. After the oxygen tank was set up next to the couch in the den, where he’d taken to sleeping because the stairs were too much for him, I went to see Dr. Cox, the one who’d sent him to the hospital, and I asked her what, specifically, was going on with my father.

“It’s somewhat complicated,” she said. “There are many factors affecting different systems and organs, and the interplay among them contributes to the damage to his body as a whole.”

I asked her if she could put that in English.

“The man’s a train wreck,” she said.