Homeland Elegies(6)
By 1997, innovations in gene testing made it possible to know for certain that Trump did not have the life-threatening heart condition that his earliest EKG strips had been thought to reveal. With a diagnosis of Brugada off the table, the rationale for Father’s trips was gone. The visits stopped. Trump never called again. In truth, Father never had all that much face time with the man outside the exam room at Mount Sinai. Apart from the morning heart tests, there’d been the occasional lunch or dinner, the comped suite at the Plaza, the one trip to Atlantic City, where he sat at a baccarat table and lost $5,000 in ten minutes while Trump looked on over his shoulder. It wasn’t reasonable for Father to feel as close to Trump as he did, but such things are rarely reasonable. He went into a kind of withdrawal—mourning, really. The simple mention of Trump’s name—on the nightly news, or in the daily paper—could conjure his gloom and send him into brooding silence.
Eventually, though, the trips to New York resumed. Under the pretext of attending some medical conference or other with only the most tangential connection to his field, he would fly himself first class; book a room at the Plaza; have dinner at Fresco by Scotto (where he and Donald once slurped spaghetti and meatballs); head to a fitting at Greenfield Clothiers in Brooklyn, where Trump’s suits were tailored and where the staff still referred to Father as Mr. Trump’s doctor; and call the person I would later gather he missed even more than Trump himself—a hooker by the name of Caroline. I wouldn’t learn of her existence until after my mother died, and when I did, I admit I was taken aback. Not that he’d been unfaithful but that he’d been paying for it. I grew up with the image of my father as an oversize Boy Scout, a feckless if well-meaning puer aeternus, bumbling along on the force of his natural gifts. He was not, I’d have said, much interested in the seedier side of life. I was wrong. Father’s first visit to a prostitute required little more in the way of goading than some “locker-room talk” between procedures one afternoon, which had Trump waxing jubilant about the surpassing solaces of professional sex. Noting Father’s saucer-eyed interest and divining his lack of experience, Trump gave him a number. I don’t doubt Father probably hung up a few times before he replied to what I imagine was a silken greeting from the other end of the line, a madam’s voice at a private club in the East 40s—a brownstone not far from the UN—where, on the second floor, Father picked his poison, a petite, buxom blonde with a long face whom Trump, too, had apparently “known” and who was reputed to have a mouth of velvet. Father fucked Caroline for fifteen years—exclusively, I would later gather (aside from my mother, of course). I would learn of her existence when I discovered I had a half sister in Queens, though this is not the moment for that Pirandellian tale. Suffice it to say Trump’s faux largesse—or, rather, Father’s longing to live in a tawdry, gilt-and-gossamer penumbra that masqueraded as largesse—this has had an outsize effect on the Akhtar family. And it accounts for something no one understands: my father supported Trump’s election, and he supported him well past the point that any rational nonwhite American (let alone sometime immigrant!) could possibly have justified to himself or anyone else. And, yes, the blow-by-blow of Father’s enthrallment with candidate Trump, first nascent, then ascendant, then euphoric, then disappointed, then betrayed and confused, and finally exhausted, a gamut of intensities whose order and range are proper to the ambit of all addiction—yes, a granular account of Father’s addiction, his ceaselessly shifting emotions, his evasions and avowals and disavowals, the steady shedding of his civility, the daily obsession, the ad hoc rationalizations—all this might be of value to note, to show, and, in the process, through this unlikeliest of American Muslim lenses, to reveal the full extent of the terrifying lust for unreality that has engulfed us all. Yes, it might be of value, but I don’t know that I can bear to pen it. I love my dad. I think he’s a good man. I can’t bear to invest a writer’s weeks and months—let alone years!—on a portrait of my father as menacing dolt. And so an afternoon’s glancing views will have to do.
To wit:
A breakfast place in Waukesha where we were the only nonwhites enjoying brunch the weekend after Trump entered the race with those infamous remarks about Mexican immigrants being rapists and murderers. “I don’t know what you’re so worked up about. He’s a showman. He’s drawing attention. He doesn’t really mean it.” “Then he shouldn’t say it.” “You’re not a politician.” “Neither is he.” “That remains to be seen.” “You’re not telling me you think this is a good idea.” To which Father didn’t respond, only gestured at the busboys in their Mexican football team jerseys: “Anyway, these people need to learn English.”
And:
His avid, mounting glee during the primary debates, as Trump insulted the other candidates. “Look at them. Wax dummies, every one. Empty suits, empty words. They deserve every bit. He’s just saying what everybody already thinks.”
And:
Trump’s proposal for a Muslim database, for which, oddly, Father didn’t believe he would have to register. “I don’t pray; I don’t fast; I’m basically not Muslim; you’re the same; he’s not talking about us. And anyway, I was his doctor, so we don’t have anything to worry about.”
And:
The mental contortions he performed to make sense of Trump’s nonsense, which made me wonder if he was going senile. “Everything he says about the media is right. It is rigged. Rigged to make money. Think about it. They don’t report news. They sell it. And what do you think they’re selling? Hmm? That Donald can’t win. That he won’t win. But the more votes he gets, the more that story isn’t true. Everybody knows this is a lie. He’s rising. They’re trying to keep him down. He’s a fighter. You know what a fighter does? He fights. That’s why we love him!” (Huh?) And: