“Tulsa? Lemme ask you something, Ba. You got Jews there?” — Jack Friedman

Jack Sh*t: “Wait for the movie. It’s in color: Volume Two” is the second installment (there will be three) in the life of my father. “Pushing” 90 — it’s how he described the last half of his 80s, years before actually getting close to 90 — and still in good health, he moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Tulsa, Oklahoma, albeit kicking and screaming. 

“He dragged me here!” he’d say, pointing to me, to those who’d ask — and even to those who didn’t. 

He wasn’t completely wrong.

For about eight years — three, four times per year — I’d fly to Vegas and help him find the lost icons on his desktop, change the oil in a car he should no longer have been permitted to drive, organize his seven different hypertension medicines into plastic dispensers, and occasionally find year-old potatoes in some cupboard that had turned to liquid. For all his ebullience and energy, my father was in his late 80s, and men that old have strokes and get lonely and forgetful and yell at those who moved the roads.  

He needed to be closer to me. He needed someone to drive him to Panera.

When the time came, I thought, better for him to die across town from me than in a nursing home in Summerlin.

His dementia back then, as mild as it was, was parenthetical, enlightening, often marked by brilliant non-sequiturs. In time, and this will be obvious in the next and last volume of Jack Sh*t, the disease would run the show. But when he was“pushing” 90 — the early Tulsa years, as I like to call them— Jack Friedman was still very much Jack Friedman.

This is that book.