Sometimes, the Complete and Total Loser makes pancakes for breakfast. The days he does that on are usually cold and damp ones, with no sun, preferably rain or snow.
Pancakes are not something you usually make alone just for you. Preparation is sloppy and much cleanup is needed. They're also not a very healthy meal. Nothing but carbohydrates, butter, and liquid sugar and after eating them you feel bloated and stuffed.
But they are a comfort food and the Loser, who always has and always will live alone, bends to his craving once every three weeks or so during the cold months and makes them.
He does something while making them that's so pathetic that it saddens even him. He imagines he's not making them only for himself but for him and the son he never had. The son is nameless. He's around five years old and a nice little boy. He and the Loser are up early. It's a Saturday or a Sunday, cold outside and gloomy. The Loser's wife—the boy's mother, also nameless—is sleeping in and will have a light breakfast and a cup of coffee when she wakes later.
It's the first time the Loser has made this meal that the boy has been able to help. His small hands are careful with the single egg the batter requires. He stirs the batter.
"You know," the Loser tells his son, "because there aren't any girls here right now, these aren't pancakes, these are mancakes, and only men can eat them."
The boy giggles.
"If a girl came in here right now," the Loser continues, "we'd say, 'I'm sorry, lady, but you can't eat any of these. These are mancakes. You have to have just toast.'"
The boy laughs. He is thrilled with this experience of his gender opening a door to an exclusive club.
The Loser keeps it up a little longer. He uses a falsetto voice to mimic a girl saying how delicious the mancakes look and couldn't she please have just one? But no, the Loser tells her, dropping into an exaggerated base, "These are for men only."
They eat their mancakes. The Loser allows his son to use too much syrup the way kids do. It's a warm, happy moment they'll both remember forever.
Even big hospital rooms often can't hold the number of visitors dying people get without some having to cram themselves into corners or sit on radiators.
This is not true with the father of a friend of the Complete and Total Loser. There's plenty of room there.
The man is 58, a year older than the Loser, and is dying thanks to a life misspent. Cirrhosis. The Loser spent several hours with his friend yesterday, and therefore her father, who he had met briefly just once before. He slept for most of it.
When he woke, it was for the succession of hospital employees who came by, none with good results.
The swallowing therapist determined that he would be unable to eat without aspirating, so food was out. A physical therapist tried to get him out of bed but he could barely manage sitting up with his feet over the side.
People, all of them women, came by to tug him up on the bed and clean him and change his gown and sheets, or take vital signs. They spoke to him with clear, loud voices that penetrated his stupor enough for him to mumble responses.
The Loser's friend, is 25 years old and is great with him, speaking to him in comforting tones a little like one would to a child, which may seem wrong but his cognitive abilities are impaired enough that it's suitable. He wasn't sure of who she was and couldn't recall her name, calling her "Dad" at one point, which makes some sense as that's what she call him. He was defining her as the woman who calls him "Dad."
He has had little to do with his daughter and her sister for many years, having divorced her mother and remarried long ago. Before this time, she referred to him as her mother's "sperm donor."
Now she has said that while visiting him last August she wanted to take a picture of the two of them together but didn't and regrets it.
*He died October 13.
This is the Complete and Total Loser's father, circa 1971, throwing a basketball. He would be 51. Never a very active man even by the standards of the day, it's a rare picture of him. The Loser took the photo out of a photo album to scan and send to his brothers, as he did a different last year on this date, his late father's birthday and saw written on the back, in his aunt's loopy flair-pen handwriting, "Wish I was this graceful too!"
Well put, Aunt Bea.
