joe suburbs is the post modern sub urban hyper rural anti hero, and vertiginous surrealist

I’m standing at my father’s deathbed in the guest room of apartment #120 of the Atria independent living facility in La Jolla, California. The guest room is maybe fifteen feet wide by twelve feet across. You walk in and three’s a couch straight ahead. It’s new; a smooth, tan leather couch a good six feet wide. When you can afford it, you buy a leather couch. None of the couches from Portobello court were good enough. When they moved from Tierrasanta to La Jolla, they had to go shopping for a new couch. It’s just what you do.

To the right of the doorway is a small sink area. In front of the sink area is the pee spot where Casper the little yap dog goes a couple of times a day. Just because you live in an independent living facility doesn’t mean you walk your dog a couple times a day.

Then, on the right-hand side is a bathroom with a walk-in shower and a toilet. Nothing special. Completely utilitarian. The shower is big enough to stand up in, and you can poop and pee in the toilet. There’s one towel bar by the shower door.

I have gone to the bathroom in there a number of times over the years, but I never got a chance to shower there. Maybe we’ll talk about that later.

There’s a little walk-in closet to the left of the bathroom on the right-hand side of the guest room. I’ve never really looked at it in any great detail. It’s overflow clothing storage. Dresses, sweaters, pant-suits and shoes that doesn’t fit into the main bedroom closet. Bottom line. It’s chock full, including one of those over-the-door jobs you can stuff shoes into. As a result, the door cannot be closed all the way and is always ajar…

There’s a chrome floor lamp between the end of the couch and the closet door. It’s positioned so that the closet door can only be opened about one third of the way. The chrome floor lamp has a huge, flat base, a long, thin, arching chrome arm and then a huge chrome head in which there’s a 40-watt incandescent light bulb. The leather couch and the chrome floor lamp. It’s just what you do.

Chrome floor lamp. Beware of head.

The floor lamp over-arches the side of the couch so it’s impossible to sit on the right-hand third of the couch. Either you are going to bonk your head on the huge chrome orb at the end of the lamp or you’re going to be electrocuted accidentally putting your head into the orb as you try to get up from the couch.

There’s a glass-top end table on the left-hand side of the couch that abuts a couple of different kinds of two-drawer file cabinets. There’s a single-pane window in the corner of the back wall. The window opens and the vertical blinds are adjustable, but the window is completely blockaded by the glass-top end table and the file cabinets in that corner of the room so you can’t actually reach it to open the window or the blinds.

There’s a wider double-window on the left-hand side of the room. But that’s where they’ve put their, old oak-laminated, particle-board desk under the window. If the desk were refurbished, that might upgrade it to ‘rickety.’ They had their computer on it in the house on Portobello Court. The computer did not come to the house in La Jolla. Because of the depth of the computer table, you can’t reach the windows or blinds on the left-hand side of the room. 

Consequently, the room is always dark.

There’s papers and manilla file folders stacked, piled and strewn helter-skelter all over the desk and the file cabinets. There are several folder organizers on the desk and on the file cabinets. The folder organizers are crammed to capacity. It’s the post-modern mess of documents commonly referred to as, “Important papers.” They keep these important papers on the desk and on the file cabinets and in the file cabinets because, “That’s just what you do.”

The Don Quixote Pablo Picasso poster is mounted in the corner between the windows. It’s old, faded, and wrinkled. Picasso drew the original in 1955 and my father must have acquired this print shortly thereafter. I’m guessing it was during a weekend visit to the Art Institute in Chicago. At that time he would have been living In Michigan City, Indiana with his first wife. The Picasso print hung in our house in Glencoe, and then he hung it in his apartment on Addison and Lake Shore Drive. It hung briefly in my brother’s condo on Caminito Tizona off Carrol Canyon Drive in Mira Mesa. That’s where my dad lived when he first moved to San Diego. After that it hung in the stairwell of the house on Portobello Court in Tierrasanta. Now it’s in the guest room of Apartment #120 of the Atria in La Jolla.

To the left-hand side of the door, they have placed a long waist-high credenza-style dresser that is again, at least 72 inches wide. it goes from behind the door to within a few inches of the left-hand side of the guest room. It’s placed so you can only open the door to the guest room about halfway.

Four columns of three rows of drawers. Overflow clothing for what doesn’t fit into the master bedroom closet. My Nana, Antoinette Battaglia lived for over 100 years. Everything remaining of her existence fits into the upper, right-hand drawer in the credenza-style dresser in the guest room.

There’s a 60-inch TV mounted to the wall above the dresser. The cable box, the DVR, the VCR, the DVD-player and the cable-modem are all on top of the dresser along with all the wires, the remote controls and more papers, more clutter and other miscellaneous items.

The deathbed is in the middle of the guest room. There’s maybe six inches of space on each side of the deathbed for a hospice aide or nurse to maneuver.

I’m standing at my father’s deathbed in the guest room of apartment #120 in the Atria, La Jolla, California. It’s Friday, 1 November 2019. My father is in a morphine-induced haze. He has missed his last three dialysis appointments.

It’s just what you do.

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