Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Rollerblading To Caracas (draft to ending)

Rollerblading To Caracas
by
Philip Bram
It was three weeks before our wedding. I had just gotten back from Providence and was leaving again in two days to shoot a perfume commercial down in Venezuela. After years of madness, I was back in the modeling game. It was morning and Sarah was in the bathroom, getting ready for work. I was lying in bed, pushing around on the left side of my abdomen where I’d been having a lot of pain lately. She came out in just her panties, flossing her teeth. Her skin was still wet from the shower, tan and wet. God DAMN!” I said. 
“What?” she asked, twisting around and looking down at her body as if she didn’t know. 
“Get over here!”
“No way. I gotta get to work. You should’ve thought about that last night.” Then she just stood there, looking at me, flossing her teeth.  
She’d been working out non-stop for the wedding. And she had on my favorite panties. I think she had only two pairs like that, a pink pair and a blue pair. She had on the pink pair. Most women had it all wrong with panties. It’s a fine line and I could go on and on about it but, basically, less is not always more. Call me a prude but I’m convinced the thong has done far more damage to the imagination of the modern male than internet porn. And it never failed with women, whenever they found the urge to surprise you with their bodies, they would always opt for the thong.  
Obviously, there was something she wanted to ask me to do, or, more likely, a list of things. I could easily be talked into just about anything. It was my biggest flaw. She finished flossing and then, finally, out it came: “So, what are you gonna do today?”
I had to make a pre-emptive move. “I’m not doing shit,” I told her. “I’m not even gonna try to write. I’m serious, that fucking job nearly killed me.” Perfect! I thought. Defiant, yet indirect. A man against the world. Way to go with your instincts! She gave me a look, her oh,-right,-it-must-be-hell-traveling-around-getting-your-picture-taken-and-staying-in-nice-hotels-and-getting-treated-like-a-fucking-king-while-I-stay-here-and-work-my-shitty-ass-job-and-take-care-of-everything,-especially-that-asshole-cat-of-yours look, but she left it at that. Time to reconnoiter. 
She walked back into the bathroom and flicked the floss from her fingers into the toilet. Then she cleaned her ears with a cue-tip and tossed that in too. I shook my head. I had been telling her for years not to do that. I’d also been telling her for years not to flush tampons down the toilet. “You can fuck right off. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Every woman does it.” 
“I’m telling you, it clogs the pipes. I’ve talked to plumbers about it.”
“You’ve talked to plumbers about tampons getting flushed down the toilet?”
“Yes, I have.”
“I’m not talking about this anymore. They’re getting flushed, period, literally.” 
She came back out of the bathroom, combing her hair. Something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye. She turned toward the open closet and leaned forward to peek inside.  She reached in slowly. “You...little...” She flung the clothes aside. “...FUCKER!” she screamed. “GET OUTA THERE!” Billy, my cat, leaped out through the air. He had been sleeping on top of a stack of her sweaters. He landed and cut around the corner and flew up the stairs into the kitchen where he hunkered down the corner by his bowls. 
“Come on, Sarah,” I said.
“No, Phil, I’m tired of it. He ruins everything! Look at this place! There’s cat hair everywhere! I can’t live like this! I fucking hate him!”
It was an on going war between them. I loved Billy. I’d had him for years. We’d been through hell together. Many times in my life, it had been just he and I. One thing about Billy, he could always tell when the writing was happening. It was incredible. Just as soon as the words (true words) began to appear, he would come strutting in and he would jump up on my lap and start purring like a kitten. From time to time we would look at each other. I could tell he was proud of me. He could feel the magic. And then there was the time I lost him on the side of the highway. We were moving back to the city from upstate New York. I was driving the big U-Haul truck alone. It was raining and windy and my windshield wipers weren’t working worth a shit. Billy had been yowling like hell since I was able to get him in the bag, which is not an easy thing to do, let me tell ya. All of a sudden my side mirror collapsed. I couldn’t see shit. Semis were blowing past me, one after another, dousing me in their wake. I was in a construction zone. There was no way to pull over. I actually whimpered out loud in fear. Then I noticed Billy had gotten all quiet. I thought maybe he knew we were going to die. Animals could sense things like that. But then I looked over and saw his nose pressing the zipper open. Then his head was sticking out. He worked his arms through and then he was completely out of the bag. He licked himself and then he looked at me and hissed. He looked deranged. His mouth was open, his little pink tongue hanging out. His tail was as fat as a raccoon’s. Then he just went completely nuts. He turned into a wild animal. He jumped up onto the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. I reached for him and and he fell to his side and started swatting at me. He clawed my arms and bit my hand. Fur was flying everywhere. I almost hit the concrete wall on the right. A truck blew by, honking. I finally knocked him off the dashboard. But then was up on the back of the seat, behind my head. I got ahold of him by the scruff of his neck. I held him like that while he hissed and bit my hand and clawed the back of my head. My ear was bleeding. I could barely steer the truck. We drove like that until I could finally pull over into the median. I sat there with the engine running in the rain, trying to catch me breath. I thought my heart was going to explode. The wipers sounded like metal scraping across the glass. Finally, we both began to calm down, and I was able to pick him up and put him down on the seat beside me. “It’s okay, buddy,” I told him. “It’s alright. Everything’s gonna be alright.” I had to somehow get him back in the bag. It wasn’t going to be easy. I had a bunch of shit on the seat and on the floorboard- my computer and a fan, and a lamp I think. I decided I would get out and go around to the other side and do it from there. I took a deep breath. I just barely cracked the door open and Billy bolted! “BILLY, NO!” I yelled. I hopped out of the truck and watched him run off in the rain until he disappeared in the tall grass. Every now and then I thought I could see him but I wasn’t sure. I kept calling his name. It started raining harder. Cars and trucks were flying by. I was drenched. I got back in the truck and sat there, staring at the grass. I picked up my phone but I had no service. I turned off the engine. I went back out a couple more times and walked around, calling his name. 20 or 30 minutes went by. It was getting late. I had gotten a late start already with the rain. I had people waiting at the new apartment to help me unload. I went back out one last time and walked a good half mile or so up the median. There was no sign of him. My shoes were caked with mud. I stood in the rain, fighting back the tears. Then I went over and pulled the mirror back into place and tightened down the nuts with my hand. I got back in the truck. I used my shirt to wipe my face and my bloody ear and I put the truck in gear. I looked back over at the grass again, then I put my blinker on and pulled back onto the highway. Bye Billy! I’m so sorry little buddy!
Two weeks had passed when I got the call from our friend, Camie, who had lived in the house beside us. “Billy’s here!” she told me. 
“WHAT?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s him. Hold on. WHAT?... OKAY! Hey, yeah, Jim says it’s definitely him! He looks pretty bad though. He won’t let anyone near him. He’s been hiding in the bushes.”
“Holy shit! You’re kidding me! That’s fucking crazy! I lost him like 15 miles from there!” 
You should’ve seen Sarah’s face when I told her. At least she tried to act happy for me. I took the train up and I got to the house and I called out his name. It was like that scene in Born Free, near the end, when Elsa finally comes running out of the bush towards Joy and George. He was hideous. He had lost probably half his body weight. His backbone was sticking out. You could see every one of his ribs. Much of his fur had fallen out and he had bleeding soars all over his bald white skin. A chunk of his ear had been bitten off. There was no telling what he had been through. But you should’ve seen him come running out into the sunlight when he heard me. Sarah would’ve thrown up if she had been there. We rolled around in the grass like lovers. He had never licked my face like that before. “I’ll never leave you again,” I told him. “I promise.”  
But then he really could be an asshole. And Sarah just brought out the worst in him. I know, it sounds pretty cruel, the way she treated him, but she really did have a point. For instance, her sister came to visit us once and she bought these expensive, knee-high, black leather boots. I told her not to leave them out. I even saw them on the floor by the couch that first night while we were sitting around, drinking. I went to grab them but she said, “It’s okay, I’ll put ‘em in the closet before I go to bed.” I tried to pay her for them but she wouldn’t take the money. Oh, and here’s a good one. Back when we moved into our last apartment in Brooklyn, Sarah had saved up some money and she bought these beautiful, red leather stools. She ordered them online and it took forever for them to arrive. They kept saying they were on backorder. Weeks went by. Sarah was always on the phone, yelling at some poor person. Then, one day, the UPS man buzzed and there they were. They came in this one large heavy box and we had to put them together ourselves. Well, I put them together while she handed me screws and told me what I was doing wrong. She just loved those stools. We had only had them a couple days when we came home from dinner and walked into the crime scene. You should’ve heard the screams. I guess you could say that was sort of their Pearl Harbor moment. But the worst thing he ever did in Sarah’s eyes had to be the day he ate a birthday cake she had made for one of her friends. She had worked all day on it. It was an amazing cake, one of her best. She had taken a photograph of her friend and traced it perfectly in all different colors of chocolate on top of the cake. She even had me take pictures of it after she placed in on the counter before we went to bed. I mean, really though, who would ever think a cat would want to eat a chocolate cake?    
Once she got going on something, she couldn’t be stopped. And it would be even worse if you tried. It was best to just let her get it all out. You still had to finesse it a bit though. You had to at least nod and say a few um hmms or I knows, show some sort of understand. Anyway: “I’m just so sick of it, Phil! Every time I look, the bottom of that couch is dangling onto the floor! I come home from work and he’s inside there, sleeping! That couch is fucking ruined! I have to staple it up every single day! It looks terrible! If we bought another one, he’d just ruin that! I’m sick of it! We can’t have anything nice! He ruins everything! He sleeps on our bed, on our new comforter! There’s cat hair everywhere! He waits for us to leave and then he jumps up on the bed and gets his idiotic cat hair everywhere! He ruins everything! My boots, my fucking purse! Remember my sister’s boots, remember THAT? The stools! Every time I come home there’s cat puke on the floor. It’s fucking disgusting! You need to take him to the vet. There’s something wrong with him. I can’t take it! I’m telling you, I can’t take it! I can’t even talk about the fucking litter box! Oh, and those fucking little claw sheddings everywhere. Uh... I can’t take it, Phil! I’m serious, I can’t take it anymore! I really can’t!”
“I know, I know,” I said. I looked up at him, sitting there, licking a paw in the kitchen. 
“It’s not fair, Phil! You go out of town on your little modeling jobs and I have to do everything! I have to clean his disgusting shits out of his litter box! I have to carry them down the stairs with me when I go to work! It’s not fair! It’s disgusting! This whole place smells like cat piss.”
“I know,” I said, rubbing my face. We stared at each other for moment. She took a deep breath then shook her head. The air conditioner kicked on. 
“So how long are you gonna be gone for?” she asked.
“I’ll be back on Friday.”
“I don’t like this. I don’t like you going down there?”
“It’s ten grand.”
“I know.” 
She walked over to her cell phone which was plugged in on the bookshelf, her muscly legs flexing across the room. She really had great tits too. I’m not much of a tit man but... As she leaned over to look at it, she ran a finger down along the seam of her panties around one of her ass cheeks. “HOLY FUCKING SHIT!” I said, leaping out of bed.
“Phil, no! I don’t have time! I’ve gotta get to work!” 
After we did that, I sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and fired up my computer. Celine was there on my desk-  Death On The Installment Plan. I picked it up and started in on that opening again. In my opinion, it was hands down the greatest opening in literary history. Devastating, untouchable, perfection. Celine was superhuman. He resented life. The only reason he didn’t kill himself was because he didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction. It was dangerous to read him. He could easily have you believing there was no reason for anyone to write anything ever again. Henry Miller did that to me too. Bukowski, Carver, Kerouac, even Hemingway, they did the opposite. I remember the first time I ever read Celine, it was Journey To The End Of The Night. I read those first few pages and then I bit the book and threw it across the room into the wall. I couldn’t take it. I still can’t. 
She was finally dressed and she went over and sat down at the bottom of the stairs to put her rollerblades on. She had her purse out and was going through it for something. “How was that?” she asked. 
“It was fucking awesome!” I told her.
“I thought you weren’t going to write today?”
“I’m not. I’m just gonna look over some stuff.”
All she did was nod with a little “hmmm,” but I knew right then that I had been played. It was like the scene in the movie Goodfellas, when Henry freezes the frame while he’s walking alongside Jimmy: “That’s when I knew Jimmy was gonna whack Morrie. That’s how it happens, that’s how fast it takes for a guy to get whacked.” The clues flashed through my mind. Why would she come out of the bathroom and stand there in just her panties, THOSE panties? We had just had a discussion with some friends a week or so earlier about my philosophy on panties. And the way she ran her finger down along the seam. Holy shit, I bet the little red light wasn’t even flashing on her phone! Fuckin’ A! Women are our masters! 
“God, I hope I make some money today,” she said. She worked the day shift at a bar they touted as the longest running honkey tonk in New York City. That’s where we met. I walked in there a few weeks after I left my first wife. She was behind the bar. I looked at her and she smiled and I said to myself, Come on, man. Are you fucking crazy? Don’t do it! You’ve got to take your time with things! But there was just no way someone else wasn’t going to scoop her up. I mean, you should’ve seen her! I’m not even ashamed to admit it; I left her a little poem beneath my empty beer bottle when I left. It read:
you are so sweet
your way, your smile,
your eyes
I wish things

I was back with Celine when she started having trouble with her sock. “UH!“ she yelled. She actually called her sock “stupid”. Then she ripped it back off and flung it around in the air and then squeezed it hard in her fist, her whole body shaking in anger. “I fucking HATE YOU!” she told it.     
I put the book down with a sigh. I’d wait to read it after she left. She gave me a look, her don’t-you-fucking-DARE!, one raised eyebrow look. “You’re the one who made me late!” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.   
“Why don’t you put them on when you get downstairs?” I asked. 
“Uh,... Why do you always ask me that?” She was finally getting the sock on. “Because,” she said, “it’s easier to put ‘em on when you’re inside. And then you just walk down the stairs backwards. And then you just walk out the door and start skating. You don’t have to sit on the stoop to put your skates on and have people walk by you. They don’t have to get around you. It’s just easier.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. I almost started to tell her again how stupid I thought it was to skate in the city, but, of course, there was no point in it.  
She was just about to put on a skate when she jumped up and said, “Hey, Phil, look, watch!” And she did a handstand against the wall and lowered herself all the way down and did a full on handstand pushup. She did two more and rolled off the wall, her toes pointed in perfect gymnastic form. Then she stood there, proudly, with her hands on her hips. 
“Damn,” I said, “that’s pretty good.” 
“I haven’t been able to do those in years, not since gymnastics.”
“That’s awesome. Good job.”
“Thanks.” 
She put on her skates and hobbled to the door. “Bye,” she said.
“Okay, bye.”
She opened the door and then she turned back around. “God,” she said, “I can’t believe we’re about to do this wedding.”
“I know,” I said, rubbing my head. “Fuck!” 
And then there it was: “Hey, I’m gonna need you to do a few things for me today, okay?” She looked right into my eyes, waiting for my response. 
“Sure,” I said. You can’t argue with defeat.    
“Okay, I’ll call you later.” Then she SLAMMED the door.
Jesus Christ! I thought, Why does she always have to slam the door like that?    
“SORRY!” she yelled back. 
I looked up at Billy. “Come ‘ere, buddy.” I told him, patting my leg. “Come on! COME on!” He meowed and looked away. 
About ten minutes later, she called. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I GOT HIT BY A FUCKING CAR!”
“WHAT?”
She was bawling, hysterical. “I GOT... RUN OVER... BY A... FUCKING CAR! SOME FUCKING BITCH RAN ME OVER! OW, OW, IT HURTS! PHIL, IT HURTS!”
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
She told me and I threw on some clothes and grabbed my keys and wallet and I flew out the door and down the steps and out on the street. I found a cab and hopped in. The cabby was old and fat and bald. He had classical music on. He wore driving gloves. I remember that for some reason. I shouted out the directions. “Everybody’s in a hurry,” he said, holding up a hand. “The whole world’s in a hurry.” Then I told him what had happened and he said, “Hold on!” And he gunned it through the city, weaving in and out of traffic. I held on to the strap and tried to breathe. We were there in just a couple of minutes. “There she is!” said the cabby, pointing up ahead. There were a couple of police cars with their lights on. I saw Sarah lying on her side in the street. A lady police officer was kneeling down beside her. Other people were standing around. We were blocked in by traffic. I jumped out and pulled out some cash. The cabbie held out his hand. “No charge,” he said. 
“Thank you,” I told him. 
Sarah’s boss, Bia, was running towards her from the other direction. We both got there at the same time. Bia was completely out of breath. She put her hands on her hips. “I ran all the way from the bar!” she said, staring at me. 
“Damn,” I said. It was as if for a second we had forgotten why we were there. Then we both looked down at Sarah. Here knees and her hands were all bloody and you could see the marks and the damage to her rollerblade where the tire had run her over. Sarah looked up at us. “The wedding!” she said. 
The old woman who had run her over was pacing back and forth behind her car, talking on her cell phone, smoking a cigarette. She looked like a total fucking bitch. “She would’ve kept going if I hadn’t screamed so loud,” Sarah said. “Fucking cunt!” At one point the woman came over and looked down at Sarah and she took a big drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out right in our faces.
“Do you fucking mind!” Sarah yelled. 
“Sorry, honey,” said the woman, walking away.    
“She did it on fucking purpose!” Sarah kept saying. “She saw me, I know she saw me! She knew I was there.” The cops went around, taking down information from people. Not one person said they had seen it happen. The ambulance finally came. 
Bia was in the back of the ambulance with us. The paramedics had left the skate on. “Do you think it’s broken?” Sarah asked them. 
“We’ll see,” one of them said. 
I called Sarah’s mom in Canada. She was at work. I tried to be careful with the words. “Kathy, I said, “Sarah’s okay but she got hit by a car. No, no, no. She’s okay, I promise. Kathy, she’s okay. She’s gonna be okay... Just her leg, her ankle I think. I know. We don’t know yet. We’re in an ambulance. I know, I know.” I handed the phone to Sarah. 
“Mommy!’ she said, crying.  
We got to St. Vincent’s and they pushed her through the doors and into a room. I started filling out the forms. Bia’s phone kept ringing. It was the owner of the bar. They texted back and forth a few times. Bia shook her head. We waited while Sarah told us exactly how it happened. Then Bia’s phone rang again. “Fucking asshole!” she said. 
“You go,” Sarah told her. “Please? Phil’s here.”
“Are you sure?” Bia asked. 
“Please, Bia, thank you so much! I love you!”
“I love you too, sweetie!” Bia said, kissing her on her forehead. Then she looked at me. “Call me as soon as you know anything.” She kissed me on the cheek and then she left. A few minutes later a nurse came in and then a doctor. They carefully slipped off her rollerblade. Sarah was lying on her back. She couldn’t see. “How does it look?” she asked me. “It’s not broken, is it? Please tell me it’s not broken!” They had to cut away her bloody sock. I wasn’t prepared for the sight of it. I winced and had to look away. “PHIL?” She pleaded.  
“It’s broken,” I told her. The nurse looked over at me in agreement.
“Let’s get her into x ray,” the doctor told the nurse.  
“Maybe it’s just sprained?” Sarah asked. “Couldn’t it just be sprained?”
“Nope,” I said, “it’s definitely broken.”  
  “Oh my God! Don’t tell me that! Oh my God!” She looked over at the nurse who had begun cleaning the wounds on her knee. “We’re getting married in three weeks!” The nurse gave her a sympathetic smile. 
Sarah put her hands over her face and started crying. “This is insane! I can’t fucking believe this! That fucking BITCH! She did it on purpose! I know she did it on purpose!” Just then the first real wave of pain hit her. “OW! OW! OW! It hurts! It fucking hurts! My fucking wedding! OW! OW!...”
They gave her some pain killers and she finally calmed down. She wanted to talk to her mom but we weren’t allowed to use our cell phones in that part of the hospital. After they did some x-rays, the surgeon came in and explained what they were gonna do. They had her sign some papers and then the anesthesiologist came in. She had never had surgery before. She was really scared. “It’s gonna be fine,” I told her. “I love you.” 
“I know,” she said, “I love you too. Make sure you call my mom.”
“I will.” 
We kissed and I held her hand as the anesthesiologist put the mask on her. He said something to her and she nodded. A nurse came over and they wheeled her away.    
I kept following the Exit signs but each Exit sign just lead to another Exit sign. Finally, I found my way out of the hospital. I was on the corner of 7th and 12th, standing next to a hot dog stand. It was still morning but it was already hot as hell. I felt queazy. I hadn’t taken my morning shit. I felt around on my left side again. Maybe Sarah was right? Maybe it was just gas? A bead of sweat ran down the middle of my back. Cars were honking. A tall black homeless man was doing some sort of tap dance in the middle of traffic. I always found it amazing that more people didn’t go crazy. He was wearing a full on down jacket with a hood. It had taken me years before I finally realized the homeless had no place to store their winter clothes. He was barefoot and about all I could see inside that hood were his eyes. They looked neon yellow. My phone kept lighting up with phone calls and texts. I called her mother first. “Phil, what’s happening?”
“She’s in surgery. It’s broken.”
“Oh my God! I knew this was gonna happen. I told her not to skate in that city!”
“I know, I tell her all the time.”
“Okay, I’m looking for flights right now. When are you leaving for Venezuela?”
“Well, I’m supposed to leave the day after tomorrow but...”
“Phil, don’t be silly. You HAVE to do that job! Sarah told me how much it’s for. You need the money. You guys are getting married.”  
“I know. I don’t think I could get out of it now anyway.”
“I’ll call you back. If I can’t find a flight then I’ll just drive. She can’t be left alone in that apartment. All those stairs. There’s just no way.”
“I know. Thanks, Kath.”
“I’ll call you back.” 
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”  
I returned about half the phone calls and texts and then I walked across the street and got a triple latte from Starbucks and took it back with me to the hospital. I found the waiting room and I sat down with the rest of the people and waited. I flipped through a home improvement magazine and found this big ad I had done for these high end European faucets. In the ad I was shaving in front of a bathroom mirror. All I had on was a towel around my waist. Who the hell am I? I thought.     
I had grown up in hospital waiting rooms. My mother was mentally ill- Munchausen Syndrome, the type where they do the shit to themselves. It’s amazing what a child can get used to. I always tell people the worst part of all of that was when things were “better”, when I would come home from school and just like that, there she’d be, sitting on that orange couch by the window. Don’t get me wrong, there was no one on earth I loved more than my mother, but I had grown so accustomed to her sickness and her being in and out of the hospital all the time that it had become a large part of my identity and I was simply lost without it. Many times my father would tell me, “You know, one of these days she’s gonna really do herself in. You know that don’t you?” I took his word as truth and had so thoroughly prepared myself for her inevitable death that I was more than counting on it, I was banking on it. My most cherished asset was the sympathy I gained from her illness and I daydreamed endlessly about the spoils of my new life as a motherless child.  
I sat there, drinking my coffee. There was a scrawny little boy sitting across from me with what appeared to be his grandmother. He looked around 7 or 8 years of age. I smiled at him and he smiled back. His grandmother just sat there, staring at her feet, clutching her purse in her lap. Everyone else in the waiting room was texting. I mean, every single person. The human race was being corralled.  
I remembered once as a boy this nice old man sitting next to me while my mother got her shock treatments. He turned and offered me one of those Werther’s candies. He had a whole bag of them. He had a buzz cut just like my grandfather. He wore black, square rimmed glasses. Long white chest hairs stuck out of the top of his shirt. One of the florescent light bulbs kept flickering in the long panel above us. He rubbed his nose and then he looked up at it, squinting. He asked me a few questions about my family. I told him the answers. Then I began to notice a clicking sound. I asked him if he heard it too and he laughed and then he told me that it was him, that he had an artificial valve in his heart. The sound hadn’t bothered me until then. But after that, it started driving me nuts. It was relentless. The man kept talking but all I could hear was that sound. I imagined it opening then snapping shut over and over again deep inside his chest. I couldn’t escape it. He was such a nice man too. I began to panic. He wouldn’t stop talking. There was nothing but the sound. It made me feel fragile, cold and weak. There was nothing I could do. I just sat there, smiling as best I could. 
The coffee worked. I found the bathroom and I went in and took a shit.  


The surgery lasted a couple of hours. When they finally let me see her, she could barely keep her eyes open, but she had this big ass smile on her face. She kept saying the funniest shit. Even the nurses were laughing. “Phil,... Do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you!” I said. 
“No, no, I mean, do you REALLY love me?”
“I love you!”
She squinted at me. “Really?”
“Yes. Do you love ME?”
She kept squinted at me. “We’re getting married.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, no, Phil, Phil. You don’t understand. We’re getting married. We’re getting MARRIED!”
“I know!” I laughed. 
She tried to shake her head but it just sort of wobbled around a bit. “No you don’t. You don’t understand.” Then she looked at the nurse and pointed at me. “Tell him. Tell him. He doesn’t understand.”
The nurse looked at me and smiled. 
I stayed with her until visiting hours were over and then I got a six pack at the deli and went back to the apartment and fed Billy and ordered chinese food and then I sat down at my desk with a beer and smoked a hit off my pipe and looked over the short story or what I thought might be a short story that I had been working on the days before I left for Providence but when I tried to pick up where I left off I found that my energy didn’t match up with the energy I had while I was writing it and most likely never would again and I began to consider the very real possibility that there may never come a time when I would be able to get the words out of me in any meaningful way and then a horrifying vision popped into my mind of an older me shuffling in line through a chain link gate toward the entrance of some evil looking factory somewhere and I winced as a wave of pain fired through my knee up to my back and through my shoulder and into the base of my skull and I looked up at the enormous thick plume of white smoke billowing out from a smokestack up into the cold, grey sky and then I looked around at the other workers and every one of them either wore a ball cap or a jacket with a Yankees or Mets or Giants or Jets logo and just as I was about to enter the building, the pot really began to hit me and the image vanished and then all of a sudden I had an epiphany about how to tell the story in a completely new way, perhaps a way that’s never been done before or even attempted and I highlighted the entire 15 or 20 pages in that glorious blue light and without hesitation, I hit the delete button and I found myself drifting into that wonderful trance where all the fear dissolves and it’s as if I’m merely a spectator and I’m watching the words appear in front of me on the screen as my fingers tap the keys and then Billy jumped up on my lap and looked up at me and batted his eyes and purred and I began to believe again that perhaps I really had a chance for I had been chosen by the Gods and that everything that had ever happened to me in my stupid life had been a gift and all I had to do was follow it and honor the calling without guilt or remorse and the only redemption I would ever need would be that some day at least one person in this God forsaken world would read my words and their heart would be crushed and filled at the same time because they would know how deeply I felt the pain of our ridiculous existence... But just then the buzzer buzzed. It was the delivery man with my chinese food. I never went back to my desk. I ate the chinese food on the couch beside Billy and drank beer and I started watching some show on the Discovery Channel about cave diving but I kept having to pause it because people kept calling to ask about Sarah. People were genuinely sad for her but mostly they wanted to know if the wedding was still on. I told them as far as I knew it was. I fell asleep on the couch just as the team of divers stumbled upon a corpse stuck in the rocks deep in a cave in Jamaica. The diver had been there since the 70s, his remains somehow preserved in the water. Poor bastard.      
       I got the call from the injury lawyer the next morning. “We should really get this ball rolling. One of us will be down there in a little while.” Sarah was still drugged up but she was eager to hear what they had to say. In our minds, it was a cut and dry case. There was simply no way we weren’t getting at least some money. My friend, Lon, had recommended the lawyer. Sarah’s sister worked for a big law firm up in Canada and she had given me a list of some ones in New York that her boss recommended we should call. She said it was very important with these types of cases that you get with a great firm, a powerful firm, but for whatever reason I just sort of went along with the one Lon had recommended. I always did that sort of thing. My first modeling agency in New York was the first one I walked into. They offered to sign me on the spot. My agency in Dallas had set up like 5 or 6 appointments for the day and they just happened to be the first. I didn’t even bother going to the others. They were terrible but I stayed with them for years. The year I finally switched to a good agency, I made almost three times the amount of money. Come to think of it, until the day at the bar when I left that little poem beneath the beer bottle for Sarah, I don’t think I had ever made a conscious decision in my entire life. My first wife? Well, one day she was just there,  sitting on my lap. It was right after my first real bout with depression. I was completely lost. I had been traveling for years. I was exhausted. I just wanted to hunker down somewhere. I moved in like a week later. What can I say? She had her name on the lease of a two bedroom apartment. I only proposed to her because I was drunk and she was crying one night because we were never going to get married. Anyway, I called the number Lon had given me and I spoke with the lawyer. He told me they were a family business. His father had started it but now it was just him and his sister. I thought the man sounded great, very down to earth. At one point in the conversation he had me hold on while he yelled at his dog. 
I was telling Sarah about him when the nurse came in to remove her catheter. Like I said, she was still a little drugged up. “I don’t understand. I thought Anne gave you some numbers. Who is he?” 
“One of Lon’s friends knows him. He’s supposed to be really good. I don’t know, I was thinking maybe they’ll take better care of us, you know, since they’re small.” I would say the look on her face could be broken down about like this: approximately 1/2, I-CANNOT-believe-you’ve-already-fucked-this-up!, 1/4, Anne’s-going-to-fucking-kill-you!, and 1/4, Oh-my-God,-what-the-hell’s-the-rest-of-my-life-going-to-be-like-married-to-this-idiot? Then the nurse moved in towards her crotch. I had to look away. 
I went and got us some bagels and coffee. Sarah said she wasn’t hungry but I got her one just in case. I got her two, actually. I could never get it right whether she liked Sesame or Poppy. I always got the wrong one so I got her both. I was crossing back over the crosswalk when a big ass 1950s something Chevy convertible pulled up. I looked at the man driving. It was Richard Dreyfuss. I smiled at him. He was wearing sunglasses. He looked at me and nodded back. It was definitely him. No matter how many times I saw celebrities, it still threw me a bit. You try to act like it doesn’t but it does. I kept walking. I loved Richard Dreyfuss. I wanted to look back and get a better look but I kept walking. The song Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx was still playing in my head from the bagel place. A grown man had written those lyrics! What was his name? Tommy Shaw? It was unbelievable how idiotic and unoriginal most lyrics were. That song had been a hit. My favorite television channel was CMT. It drove Sarah nuts. I couldn’t get enough of it. Kenny Chesney, that Toby Keith asshole, oh, and that Australian dude that’s married to... oh, what’s her name? Oh, yeah, Nicole Kidman. Anyway, all those fuckers. God, I just fuckin’ hate ‘em so much! My favorite game was to watch videos and guess the next lyric. I was rarely stumped. By the time I got back to the hospital I was really high, a little too high. I forgot to mention that I smoked a big bowl around the corner while I waited for the guy to toast the bagels. You gotta toast the bagels. 
Sarah wasn’t hungry. I was sitting on the chair, eating my bagel, while she flipped through the channels on the t.v.. She looked over at me, annoyed. “Are you humming a song?”  
“Try to guess what it is?” I started in on the opening. “Dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunna... Dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunna.”
She stared at me like I was crazy.
“It’s Styx, Too Much Time On My Hands.”
She shook her head and went back to changing the channels. “God, there’s nothing on,” she said. 
“Hey, I saw Richard Dreyfuss!”
“You always think you see someone.”
“No, I’m serious, it was really him.”
She finally found Three’s Company. It was a scene with the Ropers. Mr. Roper was standing with the vacuum cleaner for some reason. Mrs. Roper, of course, says something about them never having sex and, of course, Mr. Roper cuts her down and then hams it up to the camera. It was the first time I had heard Sarah laugh since she got ran over. 
“Oh, man, I love when he does that!” I said.  
“I know, it’s amazing!”  
“It’s like the greatest decision in television history. I wonder how it started? I bet he just did it once and they said, fuck it, let’s just let him do it from time to time. It’s fucking brilliant!”
“I love it! Maybe he was this talented theater actor and no one had the heart to tell him to stop. I hated it when I was a kid. We all did. We couldn’t understand why he would do that. We all had a big problem with it. It made no sense why he did it. We were supposed to believe he was in this Three’s Company world and then he would do that. It really pissed us off. Why would they let him do that? Like, hey, we see you doing that.”
It was really nice to see her laugh. 
Then I said, “Hey, you know, that’s sort of like what I’m trying to do with my writing, you know, like have these little like, Mr. Furley moments or something. You know what I mean?”
“You mean, Mr. Roper.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said, Mr. Furley.”
“I DID?” I really started laughing. I couldn’t stop. I almost choked on my bagel. I coughed and then I laughed some more.  
She looked over at me. Her eyebrow went up. “Did you smoke pot?” 
     
Just then, a tall beast of a woman shuffled in. She was the strangest women I had ever seen in my life, straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. She informed me that she was the sister of the lawyer I had spoken with. Her body just didn’t make any sense. She was fat and skinny at the same time. Her feet pointed out while her knees pointed in. She had a great big ass but it was completely flat. It looked like a pizza pan had been shoved down the back of her pants, an extra large one. She was ugly but then she wore a ton of makeup which only accentuated her ugliness. Her ears stuck out. They were more than twice the size of normal ears with a large percentage being lobe. She had short, frizzy permed hair. Her hair was black but then the more you looked at it, the more it began to look red, or reddish orange. She had a bit of a mustache and there was a little booger flake floating in the hairs inside her nose. She grabbed the back of a chair and drug it across the room. The noise was awful but she didn’t even notice. Then she sat in it beside Sarah and smiled. Even her smile was strange. It was like someone had once explained to her how to smile but she had never tried it until then. Sarah looked over at me for help. I shrugged. She asked Sarah a few basic questions and the she asked her to tell the story from the moment she left the house the morning of the accident. 
“You mean when that women intentionally ran me over with her car?” Sarah said.  
“Look,” the woman said, “you’ve gotta get that out of your head. First of all, she wasn’t cited by the police. And let’s say you’re right...”
“I AM!”
“Okay, well, let’s say you are and she DID do it maliciously. Even if you could somehow prove it, that would make this a criminal case which means her insurance company would no longer be liable for her actions.”
“What? Why? What do you mean?”
“We could only go after her at that point, and, well, who knows if she even has any money.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. They insure her driving.”
“Okay, well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Why don’t you just start from the beginning, the moment you left the house on your skates.”  
Sarah started in on the story but the woman kept cutting her off. She kept asking Sarah to repeat everything. Sarah was getting annoyed. The woman didn’t make us feel very positive about Sarah’s case. She said juries usually aren’t very sympathetic to people who rollerblade in the city. It’s hard for them to identify with what most people would consider to be reckless behavior. She actually shrugged her shoulders and laughed and said, “I know I wouldn’t be.” She looked at me and then back at Sarah, saw that we weren’t laughing, but then she still kept laughing. Sarah was getting pissed.  
“It’s the way I get around. It’s called transportation. And I’m really safe. I’m always looking over my shoulder.”
“Okay, okay, so, you said you were on the left side of the street, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I always skate on the left side of the street.”
“Well, see, now that right there’s a major problem. You’re supposed to skate on the right side of the street.”
“No, that’s not true,” Sarah told her. 
“Um, yes it is.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow. She winced in pain as she sat up on her elbows. The woman had no idea who she was dealing with. 
“No. You’re wrong. I’ve been skating in this city for ten years. Look at the bike lines on 6th Avenue. They’re all on the left side of the street.” 
“They ARE?”
“Yes, they are!” 
“Hmmm,” is all she said. 
Sarah looked over at me is disgust. “Sorry,” I mouthed. The woman only stayed about another 5 minutes. The tension was incredible but the woman either didn’t notice or she didn’t care. Sarah stared straight ahead and answered the rest of her questions with a yes or a no. Then the woman stood up and said, “Okay, thank you. I know you’re in a lot of pain today, Sarah. I hope you feel better fast. I’ll be in touch.” Sarah kept staring straight ahead and gave her a half-assed smile and a little nod. Then the woman looked at me. “You DO have the rollerblade, right?” she asked.   
“It’s at the apartment.” I told her. 
We shook hands and then she left.  
I could hear her shuffling down the hall for some time. “Maybe she’s like some badass Erin Brockovich or something?” I said, “You know, just weirder and uglier, taller...”  
Sarah wouldn’t even look at me.   
Some person came in and had Sarah sign some papers. Then the nurse came in and told us Sarah would be released anytime. The doctor just had to sign off. “When would that be?” I asked. 
“Very soon,” said the nurse.  
We kept waiting. They said a half hour but then the half hour passed. They said no more than a half hour again but then that half hour passed. Finally, the doctor came in and signed off on her chart. We got up to leave but then they said we had to wait for a wheelchair. It was policy. We waited. A wheelchair never came. I went and asked a nurse. “What are you guys still doing here?” she asked. “Hold on, this is crazy, let me call someone.” She called someone. “They should be right up,” she said. I went back into the room and we waited. The wheelchair never came. 
“Fuck this! We’re leaving!” Sarah said. I helped her up on her crutches. I grabbed her bag and followed her out. We went down the hall to the elevator, pushed the button and got in. “Hey, you can’t leave without...” we heard as the door closed.    
The cab driver tried to take it easy but the pain with every stop and turn took her breath away. The hardest part was getting her up the 5 flights of stairs into the apartment. She had never used crutches before. I swear, it took us over half an hour. And, of course, Billy was right there at the door, waiting to greet us. “Oh, my God!” Sarah screamed. Billy had just taken a big shit. The smell was incredible. Insult to injury. I laughed but then I saw a tear roll down her cheek.   
I got her situated on the couch with a couple pillows under her leg. I got her some water and the remote, cleaned up Billy’s shit, and then I raced down to the pharmacy to get her prescriptions filled. There was an old man standing next to me with what looked like another person stuffed into one of his pant legs. What the hell could that be? I thought. These bodies we’ve been put into. It’s just not right. Then I saw that the agency had called. I listened to my voicemail. “Bram, how are you? How’s Sarah? Are you done with your fitting?”
HOLY FUCK! I couldn’t understand how I had forgotten about it. I had never done anything like that. I called the agency and told them I was running late. I got the prescriptions and I grabbed a couple bags of chips and a few Bridal magazines and also the latest Star, In Style, People, and Us Weekly. I ran home with it all and put it on the couch beside Sarah. “I gotta go to a fitting!” I said. 
“What?”
“I forgot all about it! I’m late! I gotta go!”
I kissed her. 
“When are you coming back?”
“I’ll be right back!”
I took the A downtown and got to the fitting about 45 minutes late. I ran up the stairs to make myself even more out of breath. Sweat was pouring down my face. I told the receptionist or whoever she was that I was sorry and then I went into the whole story about Sarah getting run over and how she had surgery and about how we had to wait for the doctor to sign her out and then how we then had to wait for the wheelchair and but then it never came and how hard it was to get her up the stairs and then I had to go and get her prescriptions. Telling her made even more out of breath. She gave me a little smile. “Yeah, it’s okay,” she said. “The stylist isn’t even here yet.” She had me wait on the couch. All the magazines were high end fashion magazines, mostly european. I watched two pigeons walk around on the sill and I waited.   
Sarah was asleep when I got back to the apartment. She slept most of the day. For dinner, I made her a grilled cheese sandwich and some Lipton chicken noodle soup. Her mother flew in from Canada later on that night.   
Sarah had already decided we would go through with the wedding. Everyone had already bought their flights. We even laughed about how memorable it would be, her walking down the isle on crutches. As soon as the doctor okayed it, her and her mother would fly to Canada. I had more jobs on hold and her mother was right, with all those stairs, there was just no way. 
Sarah fell back asleep while her mother and I had a couple glasses of wine before bed. I set the alarm on my phone for 4:00 a.m. to catch my 6 something a.m. flight out of JFK to Caracas.    
I was trying to be quiet. I had my cell phone up to my ear, listening to a voicemail while I poured the water into the coffee maker. I didn’t even feel the phone slip out, I just heard it PLOOMP into the water. “Mother fucker!” I reached in and fished it out. Sarah’s mom came running down the stairs in her pajamas. “Phil, what’s the matter?”
“I dropped my phone in the coffee maker!”
“Oh no! You need that for your trip!” She took it from me and used her fingernail to flick the battery out. “Maybe we can dry it out? You go get ready. I’ll work work on it.”
“Can you guys be quiet!” Sarah yelled up.
“I dropped my phone in the coffee maker!”
“What?” 
“He dropped his phone in the coffee maker!” her mother yelled. “Phil, go shower. You gotta go!”
 
Drying out the battery didn’t work. My phone was ruined. All my details for the trip were in there. Technology was a set up. I had to turn on the light to use the computer to print out my details for the trip. Sarah pulled a pillow up over her head. I printed up the pages then folded them up and put them in my pocket. I went over and pulled the pillow down to kiss Sarah goodbye. “I love you,” I told her. 
“I love you too. Thank you for taking such good care of me. I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch lately.”
“You haven’t.”
“No, I have. I know. I’m just stressed about the wedding. And now this. I can’t believe this happened.” She smiled and put her hands on my face. “Next time I see you we’ll be getting married.”
“I know.”
“I’m the happiest woman in the world.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
I went to kiss her and Billy jumped up on the bed. “Get off here!” I yelled, pushing him away.
“I’m even gonna try to be nicer to that asshole.”
We both laughed and then we kissed. “Oh,” I said, “who’s gonna feed him?”
“I’ll find somebody.”
I kissed her mom on the cheek. “You be careful down there,”  she said. “You better make it to this wedding.” 
“I will. Thanks for everything, Kathy. See you at the wedding.”
(to be continued)

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Tales From The Big House

‎"Dude, that is so fucking funny! I can't watch porn without smoking crack and I can't smoke crack without watching porn... What a great line! Can I use that sometime? How old was that guy again?"

"He's like 68 or 69. He's got a kid he's never seen. He was telling me this story about this. He walked into a coffee shop and there was this girl sitting there by herself. Tall girl. 6 feet I think he said. And um, he walks up to her. I'm telling you this is like 20 years ago, he's, you know, 48. So he walks up to this girl and he says I'm a photographer for this New York magazine. He said which one but I forget, I'm not sure. Um, so he um, he says, I think you have a great look, a look we're looking for, and I would like to shoot you if at all possible. I'm in town for 2 or 3 days. He lives in Toronto! This guy LIVES in Toronto! Um, and so she agrees! And he's like my studio's available right now um, and um, she agrees! And he's scrambling because he told her he's a hairstylist also, to even up her bangs or something or something about her hair in the back or something so he gets her back to his place, to his studio apartment. This gorgeous apartment. His father was the co-founder of the WWF. So it's this beautiful apartment and he brings her up there and he's scrambling to make himself look authentic. He didn't even know if he had a camera. He didn't think the bit was gonna work on the girl, he was just taking a shot. I think he had a video camera. It was like a hand held video camera and he says... Anyway, that wasn't the point. He said he was a hairstylist and he was gonna do her hair and fix it up. He's high on crack at this point. He was on a 3 day bender. And so he's just improvising and he said he grabs a, these meat cutting shears out of the kitchen, they're these HUGE scissors, and he starts cutting her hair and he's, he doesn't know what he's doing. So he cuts her hair and um, he takes this video shot of her with this video camera and long story short, he, he's fucking her in his bedroom right and they were like fucking for like 3 hours he says and he says he puts her finger in her ass, because this is what we were talking about right, we were talking about whether any of us had ever licked a girl's butthole or not. And so he sticks his finger in her ass and he's feeling around and he thinks he's found a package, like of drugs. I mean this guys has been in jail his whole life! In and out! So that's what you do when you're in jail, that's what you do, you bring drugs into jail in your ass. And so he decides to pull the package out of her ass. And it turns out it's not a package, it's a shit. He pulls our her shit. I mean, she just shits all over him! He's got shit all over his hands. And so, you know, when this happens, so as this happens, someone walks into his apartment, as this is going on. Goes into the bedroom and um, it's his MOM! And she's like WHAT THE HELL'S GOING ON HERE?! It's her apartment, and he's not even supposed to be there, he’s a criminal, and... well, long story short, the girl says to her how he told her he was a photographer and she runs into the bathroom and looks in the mirror at her hair and her hair is all crooked, I mean, he fucking BUTCHERED it! And she starts LOSING it and she was gonna call the police and his mom ends up giving her like $3000 dollars to just leave and not cause a stir. Well, anyway, that's it. But he's just a crazy fucking old man, and he's crying, laughing, telling us this story. He's 68, 69 years old and he's got a million of these stories, he's fucked. I mean, we just wanted to know if he'd ever licked a girl's butthole, we didn't know he was gonna tell us THAT story..."