Valentines: “Bathing the Man Who Raised You” by Molly M. Pearson
A love letter for my dad.
He calls for help. You come running, your sister close behind, but she turns and runs back out of the bathroom, retching. You stay. You don’t look away. You roll up your sleeves.
The shower water is up to his ankles. The drain is clogged. Brown clouds swirl around his feet as rivers of diarrhea flow down his legs and the shower chair he sits on. Loose, dark chunks rain down through the cut-out holes of the seat.
He’s not ashamed, and if he’s taught you anything, neither are you.
“I couldn’t hold it,” he says.
“I know,” you reply, as you squeeze his hand and kneel at the side of the tub.
When he was discharged from the hospital the day before, his doctors said this was a turning point and that he wouldn’t be the same. They were right.
He lets you lift his feet out of the velvety brown water and you rest them on the edge of the tub, straddling the faucet. As you take the soap from him, his life flashes before your eyes.
You lather up his thighs, the thighs that once pressed into a hardwood gymnasium floor in full splits. The thighs of the only boy on the cheer squad in 1967 in a tiny Nebraska college town. His dad had driven all the way from Colorado Springs to be there for that first game of the season. He was there to wrap his son in his arms and knowingly whisper in his ear “I’m so proud of you,” a confession of what they both knew.
You scrub his knees, the knees you once bounced on when you were a baby as you giggled. Before you were born, those same knees grew sturdy and calloused from long nights in the backrooms of the Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco leather bars. Pilgrimages to get on his knees, to buckle under pleasure. Baptized by poppers, anointed by the sweat and cum of countless men, some nameless, some friends and lovers for life.
The suds glide gown from his knees and over his glorious calves, the calves first sculpted from ballet lessons as a teenager, maintained over the years from strutting in high heels in smoky gay bars for as long as you’ve been alive. Backstage in dressing rooms, lighters and eyelash glue and spare bra pads and zipper assists shared freely among the queens, always with a raspy “I got you, honey” between drags of lipstick-stained cigarettes. A last minute shave, a drop of red in the slop sink. A communion of body and blood before the procession.
You lift his feet. He arches them without thinking, wearing invisible stilettos. You scrub, taking care to get between his toes, each one a prayer he’ll make it another year, a rosary of skin and bone.
You move together like you’re in a Bob Fosse musical to get his feet out of the tub and onto the bath mat without touching the rising shit water. He twists his hips toward you in the shower chair as you guide his legs, his toes pointed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret.
He grips the towel rod to steady himself as you dry him off as quickly as you can. His breathing is labored and he needs to lay down. You take his arm. Damp and naked, he leans into you. A new way, for the both of you, of feeling two bodies pressed together.
He lays face down on his bed. You both know that you need to wipe his ass because you couldn’t reach it with the shower chair in the way. You retrieve the soap and a wet washcloth.
You wash his crack, and through the cloth you feel the contours of his ass, the ass that welcomed countless sexual awakenings. There was once a time when he didn’t know what two men could do together with their bodies, but whatever it was, he wanted it. When words were absent, the revelations came in tongues. He may not have had the words at the time, but he had the feeling: that such pleasure of the flesh is holy.
He didn’t have the words then. And as you finish wiping his ass, neither of you have the words now. But you both have the feeling: of staring God in the face. A yearning to be cleansed by another, but not to be clean. And never feeling sorry for it.
About Molly M. Pearson
Molly M. Pearson is a writer, educator, and organizer based in St. Louis, Missouri. Her work centers sex, identity, aging, illness, community, and the risks we take to survive and make life worth living. Her writing can be found at The New Territory, Catapult, TheBody, Foglifter, and serves as a co-curator of Changeling, a local cross-genre queer reading series. She teaches at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) collective, an interdisciplinary community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis. She implores us all to listen to our elders.