“This is a plastic phony little town, but its better than Duluth where I grew up. If America needed an enema Duluth is the place they’d stick it in.”

Granny licks her vicodin off of a sheet of wax paper a few minutes after her daughter crushed the chalky white tablets with a rolling pin. A spot of white powder coats the tip of granny’s elongated nose. Granny insists that the windows stay shut and the door closed because she’s cold even though the red mercury in the thermometer outside has hit 90°. The living room is thick with nicotine. The carpet behind the TV where it would be tough to vacuum is sooty and the walls are the color of coffee-stained dentures. Granny has chain smoked since before she was a nurse in WW II. The TV is on but no one seems to be watching it.
 
“What kind of flowers are those,” I say trying to start conversation.
 
“Those are ureops, some kind of god damn daisy,” granny snarls. It’s quiet after that until it’s time to lift her off the davenport, into the wheel chair for a trip to the toilet.

 “This wheelchair is a pain in the ass,” she says. Granny has a care provider, named Linda, who usually helps her to the toilet. Since we came to visit she got the day off. “Where’s that bitch!” granny says.
 
“I can help you mom,” her daughter says. “Remember Linda got the day off?”
 
“She’s probably drunk somewhere, the whore. She doesn’t know shit from shinola. I don’t care if she drinks as long as she can stand up.”

 I help lift granny out of the wheelchair onto the toilet. Her daughter helps her from that point. Nubbins, the dog, scratches at a dry diseased patch of skin on his rump and then growls at the messenger from the Library of the Blind who leaves a stack of tapes in the basket by the door.
 
Granny settles back into the indentation her small body has formed in the couch. “These books on tape are mostly crap. Dickens is the only writer who knows how to develop a character. DH Lawrence, James Joyce: I’ve got no use for those two. When I was a young nurse in World War II the colonel gave me a copy of Ulysses, and I thought, what’s all the fuss? Hemingway was a real man. None of this polyanna shit.” She pops in a tape, her fingers feel for the play button. It seems to be a new age mystery novel. “I wish they’d send me Primary Colors, I love political scandal.”

 Nubbins lays at her feet, they understand each other.
 
The care provider shows up early the next morning with a few groceries, she puts a full bottle of rye in the cupboard above the sink, turns on the TV and sits in the overstuffed chair by the drapes. She lights one cigarette for granny, then another for herself.
 

* The granny that this story was based on died earlier this month in her Phoneix, AZ living room.

The Living Room will appear in Jimmy Jazz's new
Incommunicado short story collection:
The Symphony of Urban Decay.

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