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ammonia, green beans, false cheeriness, false hope, urine and sweat and lime green Jell-O. Whatever it was, I had the usual mordant sensation as I walked into the lobby of Temple University Hospital smack in the middle of North Philadelphia. Or maybe it was the fact that my father was on the fourth floor. Any building that housed my father, whether the decaying little bungalow in which I was raised or the sprawling multilevel inner-city hospital in which he now lay, had the same effect on me, something akin to dropping down down in the deep sea and feeling my chest compress from the weight.
    He had collapsed on the steps of his home away from home, the grand and glorious Hollywood Tavern, in his sad suburban enclave of Hollywood, Pennsylvania. There was blood coming out of his mouth and his breath was wet, and in the ambulance they had enthusiastically pumped him full of drugs. By some miracle he hadsurvived the trauma of the ambulance and, when he had been stabilized at Holy Redeemer Hospital, he had been transferred to Temple. The religious symbolism was deliciously inapt, but Temple was the only hospital in the area that performed the delicate yet brutal surgery his condition required. Now they were treating the pneumonia that had invaded his lungs and were waiting for him to gain enough strength so they could open up his chest and kill him proper.
    “Hi, Dad,” I said with as much pep as I could muster.
    “You’re back,” he said, matching my pep with his normal tone of bitter resignation. “You was just here. What, is your cable out?”
    “Don’t be silly. I came to see you. But I do seem to remember the Sixers might be playing Orlando tonight. Do you want me to put it on?”
    “What for? I seen enough gunners in the damn army to last me, I don’t need to see that Iverson bum.”
    “He’s good. I like watching him play.”
    He waved his hand in disgust. He could barely move, my father, lying on his bed, his face gray and drawn and unshaven, only sixty years old but looking like he’d already been buried twice as long. A clip bit into a finger of his waving hand, reading the oxygen level in his blood, now a paltry ninety-three percent. He barely had enough energy to breathe, sure, but he was never without enough energy to give the world a dismissive shove. “I seen Chamberlain play. Greer. Cunningham coming off the bench. After what I seen, he’s nothing.”
    “So how are you doing?”
    “I’m dying, how do you think I’m doing?”
    “You’re not dying.”
    “Yes I am, and it’s not such a bad thing neither. At least I earned it. I didn’t earn much in my life, but I earned this.”
    I took off my coat, sat down beside his bed. “Nice to see you in a good mood for a change. What’s going on?”
    “What the hell do you think is going on? I lie here and they stick things in me. Bloodsuckers, is what they are.”
    “And you, of course, are being your normal, personable self.”
    “You try smiling as they play voodoo with your body. If the sickness doesn’t kill me, they’ll do it themselves.”
    I smiled indulgently. “Why so cheerful this evening?”
    “They got this thing up my dick.”
    “To help you pee.”
    “Sixty years I didn’t need no help.”
    “Want me to adjust it for you?”
    “Stay the hell away from me, you bastard,” said my father. “So there’s that. And, I don’t know, I been thinking about things.”
    “Oh, Dad, don’t do that,” I said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Especially here. No good can come from it. We’ve both made it this far precisely by not thinking of things.”
    “And look where we are.” He tried to shift in the bed, struggled to take a breath. His face enlivened brightly with pain. “Hell,” he said.
    “Why don’t I turn on the game?”
    “I been thinking about things,” he said. “I been thinking about…things.”
    “The Sixers?”
    “A girl.”
    “Should I turn it on?”
    “A pleated skirt.”
    “Ah yes, pleated skirts.