Little Motel

Deer, cops and drunks. These are the only things you see on Hwy 61 at 1:01am. Midnight Man by the James Gang pops up on shuffle followed by Little Motel by Modest Mouse, and the speakers in the dashboard are communicating with me in a way that no human on earth possibly could. A lit up marquee next to a church reads “Jesus is the Way.” I am a Mandalorian on a mission to rescue a dead man. I needed to show him something he never showed me during his lifetime. So I put on a pair of pants and drove 132.4 miles in the dead of night. I feel like I should be listening to Springsteen’s State Trooper right now, but Nebraska seems a bit obvious for this nocturnal undertaking. Shuffle it is.

“Andy?” He recognizes me in the middle of the night on a Tuesday. He has one eye open and I am instantly transported to a time in my youth when my Grandpa Lowell used to take naps in his living room chair. He literally slept with one eye open, his years long battle with cancer having taken out one of his eyelids. It always freaked me out, it was like he was always watching me.

My dad needs help to the bathroom. He slowly rises like a ghoul and reaches for my arm with his one good hand. Gently we trudge the 8 steps from the bed to the bathroom toilet and pull his pants down so he can go pee. His dead right foot barely brushes the leg of his dresser and he yelps in pain like a dog that has had its tail stepped on. “The damn thing won’t work!“, he whisper shouts in my ear. “It sucks to die.” he also opines mournfully. We do this every 3-4 hours for 2 days and he has begun ranking the adventures. After one arduous struggle in which his legs became entangled and I had to forcefully sit him on the throne, he gives his own personal yelp! review as “Worst Bathroom Yet” before flopping face first into his bed. I feed him a Percocet and he falls asleep for nearly 5 hours. There’s no cable or internet right now, he must have forgotten to pay the bill in his current state. I am using the Tubi app on my phone to watch the movie Affliction while trying to sleep on the unforgiving brown leather couch in his apartment.

The precarious times are in the middle of the night. Usually I hear him raggedly cry out “Andy…Andy…” and go in to help him. This time he just says “Hey… Hey…” I am dreaming about fumbling a roll of film that keeps popping out of my camera. Shit, it is 3am. He has to piss again, the old 1990s baby monitor my uncle has rigged up is crackling and buzzing like radio static. “FUCK I can’t remember your name” he says as I try to get my bearings to take him to the can. Whenever he forgets something he yells FUCK then gets increasingly mad at himself, and I feel increasingly helpless. The movie Affliction is my punishment, I will watch something hopelessly dark to feel better about my little motel.

“That’s what I’ve got for children…Jesus Freaks and Candy Asses!” hollers James Coburn at his wife’s funeral. Affliction shows you the dark side of family like no other film in history, these are the bugs that come crawling out when death lifts the giant rock that’s been hiding all the family foibles. When your father is dying you think about all the bad things you did as a kid, and all the bad things he did. You try to reconcile their meaning in your mind but it only leads to puzzlement. You think about what has been passed down to you genetically and what hasn’t. Will I meet a similar fate as my father and grandfather before me? Will my children? Will their children? For a middle-aged working class white male like me, Affliction Director Paul Schrader is continuously making you examine yourself and your place in the world. His character’s hearts beat with the uncompromising uncertainty of the human condition. Think DeNiro in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Ethan Hawke’s priest in First Reformed, Nick Nolte in Affliction or Bill Devane in Rolling Thunder. You think about how these men must reckon with their past without coming completely off the rails. In the cinema it usually ends badly. In the real world, you mustn’t let it.

The wintry night scenes in the first half of the film sound like they are scored to the intro of Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box. The film leans hard into this, but then once Nolte’s world unravels like a cheap sweater after too many washes we get sweeping orchestral music. It’s an odd combo that continuously keeps you off balance. Heart Shaped Box, damn, I remember listening to that song over and over again in the winter of 1993 just a few blocks from here…sitting trance-like on my bed in the cellar-like basement room of my dad’s late 1800s built house. It was cold and bleak just like the New Hampshire snow in Affliction. It matches my current mood as well. The look on two-bit cop Nick Nolte’s face when he has a mental break directing traffic in front of a school looks eerily like my dad’s does when the wheels turn and he begins questioning his environment again. Like Nolte he lives in a netherworld of pain and confusion now. This will change when his girlfriend shows up to feed him oatmeal one spoonful at a time. The moment is fleeting, but it is good.

While the nightly girlfriend feeding takes place I am able to leave the little motel for a half hour. Let me tell you, you haven’t truly lived until you’ve horked down an original chicken sandwich from a small town Burger King that is drenched in both Mayonnaise and tears. I put the song Mayonnaise on by the Smashing Pumpkins as I forlornly munch on the grub in a Target parking lot. I think playing Mayonnaise while looking at Mayonnaise is funny, but then I realize there is way too much lettuce on the thing. There is always too much fucking lettuce. As I listen to the sad meandering guitar part on the song I pretend I’m back in high school again. I’m hating life, but also know that once I graduate I can get the fuck outta here. Is a parent’s death like a graduation?

The last bathroom adventure turns out to be the worst. He’s beginning to lose balance in his one good leg now. He barely gets on the pot and his weiner hangs out sadly as he sits down. I absentmindedly talk to him like I did to my son when he was potty training. “Don’t forget to tuck your wee wee!” I sing song at him. His face turns more menacing than James Coburn in Affliction and it’s almost as authentically scary. “What?” he says dryly. “I said, don’t forget to tuck your wee wee.” He hears his brother (my uncle) snicker a bit behind the bathroom door trying to stifle a laugh. “I don’t talk like that.” he says with quiet malice. “That’s BULLSHIT!” he yells at the top of his ravaged voice. “I’m sorry..” I mutter, then walk away bitterly. He thinks we are treating him like he is a child.

The next day I drive home in the blinding sun, stopping in a one winged town to take a piss. I’m grateful I don’t have to wear a diaper or stick my dick in a jug like my dad will have to do. Effigy by CCR pops up on shuffle. Seems eerily appropriate when it feels as if everything you once knew is burning down around you. The frigid air conditioning of the Kwik Trip slaps me back out of my highway hypnosis. How Bizarre by OMC plays dutifully while nature runs its course at the urinal. I hate that fucking song.

Something about Willem Dafoe’s stoic voiceover at the end of Affliction sticks with me. He states matter of factly that his character’s brother lived on the edge of his emotions so he had no perspective to retreat to in times of crisis. I think a lot of us are like that. Then when crisis comes like a thief in the night, you either accept it and learn to control your response…or you end up exorcising your demons with a rusty set of pliers and a few gallons of gasoline. Then you pour yourself a stiff drink as the world burns down around you. That used to be me. That story is over, yet I continue.