Jonathan's Daddy

The heart monitor and other monitors for vitals beeped and chirped on. It had sounded like that in this grand room for two months, and if you sat in there long enough, the sounds were enough to drive a person crazy. 

“It reminds me of the damn bridge on the U.S.S Enterprise!” Jonathan thought. Watching those old episodes of Star Trek as a kid, he’d often wondered how Captain Kirk and company didn’t go insane from the constant bombardment of sounds from the electronic equipment around them.

“What’s the damage report, Scotty?” Jonathan sardonically asked to the room.

“Your father is in a dire condition, captain. I don’t think I have the power to raise him!” he imagined Scotty replying in his distinctive Scottish accent.

Yes, his father was a lost cause all right. He had been summoned home by his mother three months ago, after learning that his dear old Dad had suffered a severe heart attack; then a stroke followed, rendering the once mighty Joseph Belvedere into the vegetable he saw before him today.

“You won’t be staring down your nose at me anymore, old man,” Jonathan announced to the body before him. How he hated him.

Jonathan was 22 years old and attended Harvard University. He was enrolled in a pre-law program, even though he didn’t want to be a lawyer. But his father had forced him down this path because that’s what the old man wanted. 

Never mind it was Jonathan’s life. No, he had to do whatever his father directed because that was where the money came from. Without that money, his father reminded Jonathan, he would be unable to forge any kind of satisfactory future.

It was true: Jonathan hated his father, but loved his father’s money. 

Suddenly, the door to the expansive bedroom opened. The woman who had been Jonathan’s only supporter all these years, yet rendered helpless because she was also Joseph’s wife/slave, entered.

“Jonathan, why don’t you go downstairs and get some breakfast?” she pleaded. “Benson made some of those excellent omelettes again.”

“No, Mom. I’m just not hungry yet. Maybe later,” Jonathan explained.

“What are you going to do today? she asked.

There was a sadness in her voice because Margaret knew how Jonathan’s life had been put on hold since her husband’s health emergency. Jonathan continually looked like a lost puppy who needed direction, but couldn’t find it.

“I thought I’d take in a movie with Bridgette later this afternoon.” Jonathan responded. “There’s a new Friday the 13th movie out.”

‘Oh, they’re still coming out with more of that trash, are they?” Margaret lamented. “Oh well, I guess to each his own. I suppose you wouldn’t like any of those romances I sometimes watch. Remember The Notebook?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Jonathan admitted. Why did his mother insist on all this mindless small talk this morning? He guessed it was his mother’s way of introducing some normalcy into this grim situation. For if they didn’t talk, then the silence only gave them more time to notice all the beeping noises from the medical equipment that was keeping his father alive.

“Why can’t he just die and let us get on with our lives?” Jonathan wished privately.

“Anyway, I’m on my way out to get some onions. Benson is making chilli for supper tonight. I’ll see you and that sweetheart of yours later, will I?” Margaret posed hopefully.

“Yeah, we’ll drop by for supper, Mom,” Jonathan answered. He had to get out of here. He needed to put his father out of his mind for a while.

Jonathan’s mother left and within a minute, he could hear the sound of her Mercedes Benz come to life and roll away towards town. 

He glanced at his father’s lifeless figure on the bed. The family had been told that the only thing keeping him alive was the ventilator that now pumped on forever. Joseph Belvedere had been brought home one last time so that he could die. To Jonathan, it was a cruel joke, because for all intents and purposes, there lay a corpse before him. It was only a legal matter that kept him from the fortune he stood to inherit.

Jonathan left the room and was out of the house for the day. He got in his BMW and made a beeline for his girlfriend’s place that was only a few miles away.

Bridgette’s house was modest by comparison with Jonathan’s. She had only graduated from high school a year before, but was wise beyond her years. She had learnt a great deal from watching the best teen series on Netflix. Shows like The OC, Dawson’s Creek, and One Tree Hill had made her into the woman she was today: a self-absorbed, money hungry, sexually liberated, foul mouthed bi-otch who loved Jonathan’s money, more than the man himself. 

Jonathan knew quite well that Bridgette wasn’t with him for his good looks or nice personality. As she had told him several times after they had ingested a drunken sailor’s quota of liquor, “Johnny, if you suddenly become poooor, then I’m out the dooooor.” 

“My poet,” Jonathan sighed.

He walked through the door of her house/trailer after parking his BMW over a cat. She was sitting on a ratty couch, doing lines of coke, as usual. Bridgette looked up at Jonathan with an expression of annoyance. 

“Oh, it’s you, Johnny.” she blurted out. For some reason she had expected Brad Pitt. “Is your old man dead yet?”

“Naw, his heart keeps beating like it has a reason to live,” Jonathan said. 

“Then let’s do something to fix that,” Bridgette suggested. She decided that she didn’t want to wait any longer to move out of the fancy trailer she was living in. “Ma, I’m going out with the ball and chain for a while!!!” she screamed in the direction of the master bedroom.

“All right! All right, Bridgette!” her mother screamed back. “Stop disturbing me. This man has paid good money to be here, and I don’t want him giving me a bad rating on Tinder. Go on, get the hell out!”

And so, Bridgette and her sugar daddy got the hell out.

“One of these days, Johnny, I swear I’m going to light a match as I’m leaving this dump. Then we’ll both stand around and have ourselves a marshmallow roast.

The image struck Jonathan as very romantic, certainly more romantic than The Notebook had been. He put the BMW into gear and they stormed off, spraying a bunch of small rocks at some children who were playing hopscotch nearby.

Jonathan did not like speed limits. Let’s get that straight, right at the start. It didn’t matter if the boy was whipping through hospital zones, school zones, nursing home zones, or by the police station for that matter. As he blazed a trail across the dirt road that led from the trailer park, Jonathan cursed at the potholes that littered his path. 

“When is the city council going to fix this damn road, Bridgette?” Jonathan asked.

“Well, who do you think mama was with back there? If anybody can help, it’s councilman Jim. Just for insurance, I set up the video camera, too. The fear of Mrs. Councilman seeing that video will end up getting my trailer park a big renovation for sure!” Bridgette boasted.

Jonathan grunted in agreement and drove on towards the movie theater to take in an afternoon of Jason Vorhees mutilating a fresh group of teens. The couple enjoyed a meal of pizza in the mall’s food court first, and then were surprised during the movie when Jason’s role had been re-written in a surprise twist. Jason became an environmentalist/human rights activist after one of the characters had stabbed him with a knife that belonged to Jane Fonda.

Since the kids had promised Jonathan’s mother that they would drop by for supper, they drove to the mansion where their meal was waiting for them. The meal was tasty, but the atmosphere in the house was bleak. Nobody said much at all, just a few obligatory pleasantries. 

Later, Jonathan and Bridgette went to the rec room to watch another movie and maybe fool around a bit. 

“What will we watch? Bridgette asked.

Before he had a chance to answer, Jonathan had an idea that hit him like a ton of bricks.

“Wait a minute!” he whispered in a conspiratorial tone of voice. “I don’t know why either of us didn’t think of this before. Let’s shut off the old man’s ventilator, so that he can finally die and we can collect my inheritance?”

“Baby, sometimes you astound me with your brilliance,” the lovely Bridgette admitted.

Making sure that no one else was around, the conniving pair sneaked into the room with the living corpse and shut the door behind them. 

Jonathan went up to the ventilator and examined it for a minute. No, it wasn’t like the movies, he thought. The thing didn’t have to be unplugged to make it stop. There, as obvious as the nose on his face, was the on/off button. All he had to do was press that button and his problems would be solved. 

Jonathan pressed the button.

Then all hell broke loose! Machines started to emit high pitched alarms and it sounded like Fort Knox had been breached. Were it not for the sheer size of the mansion, they would have been heard immediately. 

But as it happened, Margaret Belvedere was in one of her three living rooms downstairs, passed out drunk. The help had left for the day, and so no one was around to hear the alarms.

Jonathan got his head together and quickly unplugged the rest of the machines. Immediately, there was silence. When no one came into the room, or his mother’s voice wasn’t heard inquiring about the noises, Jonathan knew that he had made it. To the police and medical examiner, they would only see a natural ending to the great Joseph Belvedere.

The couple breathed a sigh of relief. “Can we go to Vegas, baby? Bridgette asked. 

“Sure, once the lawyers do their job and I gain my inheritance. It should only take a few days, and then we can go on that trip,” Jonathan assured his beau.

“What about Mama? Are you going to take care of her, too, like you promised?” Bridgette asked.

“A promise is a promise, babe,” Jonathan replied.

“It doesn’t matter much, anyway,” Brigette continued. “I reckon she’ll be dead inside of a month. With unlimited booze and drugs, her heart will probably give out.”

“Let’s hope not,” Jonathan said. He had been frisky with Bridgette’s mama a couple of times without his girlfriend finding out. He liked having that backup outlet available to him should Bridgette not be putting out on certain nights.

The conversation switched back to Joseph Belvedere. Son looked at father, but father couldn’t look at son. How could he? The father was dead! 

“I hate you, you son of a bitch”, Jonathan announced. A single tear made its way down his left cheek.