Big C Suite

12 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW DAVID HILTON BIG C SUITE for "Tommy" Hilton Mother's last letter said you finally realized it's terminal almost a year after the surgeon called you in to show you the films and explain how it's cancer, not an infection, in the right lung, inoperable because nothing would be left except emphysema. "Yeah, it's the Big C," you actually say, "when he snipped it open I could feel the air rush in, but they give you only one biopsy . . . and that was my second." — Her first letter: "David, hope and pray it's not cancer." I was nine and we were driving back Sunday from Russian River, you said "whore" as part of a joke and I laughed so hard you said, "I just keep him around to laugh at my jokes," and tickled me until I got a bad asthma attack and mother said, "Tommy, look what you did"— that's about all I remember of that sort of thing. Tommy, you stole a wife and me from a 19-year-old Irish tenor called "my real father," all abstract rumor like Catholic Beater-Up of Cops, more unknown than the Devil but for the one secret sensing I'm sure I had of him: a fine, pure howl, a keening that rose from the dark Outside, sleep-music to the infant whom it roused 13 HILTON and shook without waking. Grandma once showed me an antique news-photo she'd saved from the Chronicle: beautiful, sullen shock-haired 1939 motorcycle punk in Superior Court for sentencing, my mother seated next to him, clutching the child as if even then I had to save her. I think I must have his voice. My mother made me sing for her neighbor friends. Once I huddled in a fireplace, hid my face and sang "The Anniversary Waltz." Another time I sang from inside a closet. What did the neighbors think of that woman urging her small boy whose voice climbed from a deep hole, to sing it over again and louder? You tore down engines since you were fourteen. And for a few years after the war whenever customers fell for your phantom valve-jobs you'd come home and hurl great fistfulls of dollars to the kitchen floor and say, "I don't want all the money in the world . . . just MOST OFIT!"and very rich and drunk you'd dance and curse upon your money. Last year before you died you asked me about the name, has it "opened any doors"? You told me then how Hilton got you a choice weekend table at Tahoe for Sinatra once and Wayne Newton, George Gobel, many others. I always say, "No, 14 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW no relation to the hotel.' I'll not be there when you die. Who will stand at the grave besides your brother, smart enough to stick with GM, now parts manager, and my mother and her crazy sister and my two brothers ("half-brothers, technically," I explain), and the wife of the one not getting divorced? Will anyone come to see you in the funeral home except Pete Ostrowsky, the almostmillionaire auto-upholsterer with the 210 average at Broadway Bowl in 1953, your pal? No, Pete won't come, he's a real millionaire now. Only the woman, Dolores, whose name means Sadness, will sit by you and thank any mourners as if each knocked on her door and wished to demonstrate the vacuum, the beautiful Hoover she bought in 1942, your bride. For a while cobalt burns fresh air passages, stuns the tumors. After chemotherapy you're feeling OK, want to get back to work, but solvent eating itself in your hot-dip tank literally blows up the last TOMMY HILTON'S AUTO AND MACHINE SHOP, just a rented shed in East Oakland, niggertown you called it but said the niggers were better than some white men you knew. Even in that shed you were Tommy and displayed in its dimestore frame the DOCTOR OF MOTORS diploma awarded by Perfect Circle Piston Rings, 1948, when you bought your first boring bar and drank cheap Scotch with rich smalltimers...