On the morning that I woke up to my dad “masturbating,” it hadn’t occurred to me that him having his pants around his ankles in the living room was Exhibit A that he was suffering from “difficulty in thinking” and/or “disorientation.” Rather than blaming dementia, which in retrospect was plain as day, I chalked it up to a natural uptick in his quirkiness, common for old age, and sure, maybe he was losing it a little.
Part of the explanation for being so dense about dad’s condition was his hopeless optimism. He rarely complained, and he expected very little from others, so it was hard to tell if he wasn’t feeling well. I tended to focus on what was in front of me instead of understanding his behavior with medical terms. But it wasn’t all on me. He, too, counted the positive so much that he could be delusional.
A couple years before he died, we were out for a drive, listening to his jazz favorites, Duke Ellington or Chico Hamilton. We usually drove around Green Lake, and if he wanted to listen more, I’d improvise in the North Seattle area. He used to love to drive while listening to music, and he missed it a lot. This was the next best thing since he couldn’t drive anymore.
We were waiting for a red light to change. Dad was slumped over in the passenger seat of my Subaru, half mumbling and half humming with the music. He looked across the street and saw an old man laboring to put his walker in the back seat and to open his driver’s side door.
Noticing him, dad said: “God, I’m glad I’m not that guy.”
Wait, what?
“Dad, you are that guy! You’re worse than that guy. He can put his own walker away, for god’s sake! He can drive his own car!”
I didn’t say that, of course, but boy I wanted to. I had to think for a second about whether he was being sarcastic because he was once deftly capable, but his edge had faded.
Dad was serious though, so instead, I said, “Yeah,” and smiled, because that misunderstanding about his own condition — strokes, dementia, old as hell — was classic Don Flavin.
After this demonstration, who was I to let him know the truth?
That’s why when a man of 88 years occasionally stretches the boundaries of typical behavior, you might not think too much of it when you wake up to find he’s playing with his decidedly not erect penis. It was, at worst, curious behavior, especially if you’re not looking to make too much of it because you spend most of your time trying to stay positive.
It is what it is.
At least once a month from about 2006 until he died in 2016, I drove from Portland (where I lived) to Seattle (where dad and his long-time partner, Sue, lived). I usually spent at least one night of the weekend at their one-bedroom apartment. I’d visit my brother Steve, sister Liz, and daughter Angel while in town, but I’d usually sleep there at least a night, especially as they got older and time was dwindling faster every day. I helped with shopping, running errands, putting furniture together, reconnecting the cable to their TV, or whatever came up that weekend. We went out to eat once or twice and had meals at home, too.
Dad was always an early riser, but in his last five to seven years, it got ridiculous. It used to be that he would naturally rise around 5:30 a.m.; whereas he started to get up as early as 4:30, or even 4:00 sometimes.
I slept on their 25 year-old futon couch, which was just as much a testament to my ability to sleep anywhere as it was to their unwillingness to buy a new one. I didn’t bother to open it as a bed — which was an option — so as a couch it slanted downward from front to back. This meant that if I wanted to switch from sleeping on my right side to my left, I had to get up and put my head at the other end. Or else gravity brought my face uncomfortably to the back of the futon.
I didn’t mind, so I laid down a sheet and with a couple couch pillows and propped up the shitty pancake pillow they spared from their bed. In all that time, it never occurred to me (or them, for that matter) that I could have bought a nice fluffy pillow and left it there for my use. After all, their bedroom was barren. It had a box spring and mattress, a lamp, a mirror leaning against the wall, a 3-drawer dresser, and one small wooden box that dad used as a nightstand to hold his water. There was more than enough space to store a nice comforter, too. Instead, I just used what they had on hand.
You’d think they lived in poverty; they didn’t. Sue had inherited large sums of money twice in the course of their last 20 years together, so while their apartment looked like a nice starter home for an early 20-something, they lived as well as they wanted. Rather than affording a condominium with a nice view, they lived with old, functional furniture and spent most of their money eating at the best restaurants in Seattle. “Food was the new sex,” Sue would say.
I always kept earplugs there because I knew my dad would be up well before the sun. He’s the loudest morning person in the modern history of waking up with pots, pans, and dishes filling the kitchen, so usually his banging and crashing would wake me up initially, then he’d read or watch TV, so I could fall back to sleep for an hour or so. Most times, I would feign asleep because otherwise dad would start a conversation, something he did with himself anyway, with or without having someone there to hear him.
When I woke up to find him “masturbating,” there were a couple small lamps on, and the living room was dim. My head was nearest to where my dad was sitting.
At first, I remained still for a moment to gather my thoughts. I’m not the type of person to wake up groggy, so I immediately knew the bottle of lotion on his ottoman was out of place. Then my eyes got oriented to the dark, and I noticed his shorts around his ankles. “Okay, something’s up,” I thought. No denying it, but I did anyway.
Like dad’s chair
Before looking up, I considered the possibilities. I still hadn’t seen exactly what he was doing, but shorts around ankles plus a nearby bottle of lotion equals probable self-pleasuring.
I contemplated that maybe he was taking a prescription or two that resulted in extra dry skin. Sometimes people get localized itching and dryness, and for all I knew, he was applying lotion for that totally sensible reason.
I was still not expecting to see him handling his penis. He was 87 years old, after all, and his medicine ended the possibility of erections. Try as he might, masturbation wasn’t happening — not in the conventional sense, anyway.
I remained still so that I could consider more options: “Maybe this is something he’d always done for his dry skin, but today he didn’t bother to do so in the privacy of his bedroom or bathroom? That’s a little outside of typical behavior, but not that far out.”
I was trying to downplay the obvious. But I didn’t really believe my own reasonable explanations, so I had to face it: my dad was masturbating in his living room chair five feet from where I laid my head. I don’t know if it qualifies as masturbation if you don’t have an erection, but I quickly figured out that he was, if for no other reason than because he believed he was.
I sat up and looked at his face (strictly at his face) to help ascertain that intent. I knew, of course, but I asked anyway:
“Dad, what are you doing?”
“Masturbating.”
I paused. “Right here?” I paused again. “Right now?”
Some piece of his mixed-up mind caught my disbelief, and he correctly took it to mean that I needed a more thorough explanation.
“Yeah, Sue doesn’t help me anymore. She’s not interested, so I have to do it.”
Not for a second did I believe Sue wouldn’t help him. She and dad were notably sexual people. They were literal swingers in the 70s, and they showed interest for as long as they were able and, I’m fairly certain, after that. I said, now without the tone of incredulity, “You’re in the living room.”
“Sue’s in the bedroom, and she’s sleeping.”
“Couldn’t you wait till I’m not here?” He didn’t answer, but he also stopped flopping his penis around. Instead, I went to the bathroom to gave him a chance to decide what he’d do next. When I came out, he had pulled up his shorts.
Thank god.
If he decided to continue when I came out of the bathroom, all of my options were shitty: go back to sleep while he “finished” (not happening), stay in the bathroom and peek out occasionally to see if he “finished” (I’d rather not), get up and make my coffee and cereal and pretend it’s not happening (possibly), or leave the apartment altogether (but where would I go at that hour?).
In the end, it was harmless enough, not overly shocking, and he did pull up his shorts after all. If he had had an erection, that would have been horribly awkward. But he didn’t, so I stayed up with him, and we talked for a little while about normal stuff: What we would do that day, where to eat lunch, and so on. Then we worked on crossword puzzles, and he read from his newspaper while I looked at my phone until Sue woke up.
When Sue woke up, dad sat in his chair with the TV on while he marked up The New Yorker magazine with a felt-tip pen. She and I shared the kitchen, as we made our separate coffees, put together cereal, some toast, and cut-up fruit.
Aside from the bathroom and one bedroom, the rest of their apartment was essentially one big room; the dining room was part of the living room, with the breakfast table between the kitchen and the living room. Sue and I were talking in the kitchen, and I said quietly with air quotes, “Dad was ‘masturbating’ this morning.”
Sue took the toast out of the toaster and carried it to the plates, already on the table. Without negativity, surprise, eye contact, or pause, she said, “Yeah, he does that. I don’t know why, though; he can’t get get an erection.”
I replied, “He said that you don’t help him, so that’s why he has to do it.”
Sue still didn’t change her morning routine in the slightest, nor her tone: “Yeah, he says that, too.” She had her own way of dealing with dad’s new quirks by assessing them at face value. Dad wasn’t mean or violent (not that he had that in him in the first place). He was becoming different from the way he had been, and that was all there was to it.
Sue and I used to joke about people who used platitudes like “it is what it is,” or “shit happens,” or “what are ya gonna do?” She hated the popular phrase at the time, “Just sayin’.” She would read articles about modern language and slang in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, and of course I was exposed to a lot of that in my high school classrooms, so we had a lot of fun conversations about words and language.
We were also honest with ourselves, and phrases like “it is what it is,” however empty, helped us cope. Maybe we didn’t say it, but we did live it. Knowing more about why dad did some of the things he did wasn’t particularly useful in the day-to-day goings-on, nor was having a latin derivative used by the field of medicine to label those behaviors. So he was “masturbating.” So what?
Sue and I wrapped up our breakfast preparations.
“Dad,” I called. Then, a little louder, “Dad.” He looked up. “Breakfast,” I said.
Dad hobbled over with his walker, and we all sat down. Sue pointed her little remote control at her Bose Wave Music System and pressed play. “Poetry Man” by Phoebe Snow.
