*
I was sitting on a plastic chair with fabric cushioning. I was in the waiting room alone filling out paper work for the injuries. The place was a twenty-four hour urgent care. A thick Mexican with an American accent sat behind the front desk looking miserable as she processed my treatment paper work.
I checked boxes on paper that asked questions like do you have: Diabetes. AIDS. Allergies to Medications. Irritable bowels. Vomiting blood. Blood in your stool. I checked No, No, and No.
Then one of the boxes asked: Alcoholism.
I looked up at the Mexican, she was still miserable.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She replied, without looking up from her papers.
“Say I drank every night, seven days a week? Would I check 'Yes' under Alcoholism?”
“Have you been previously diagnosed with liver disease or anything as a result to high alcohol consumption?”
“Uh no, not yet.”
“Then check 'No'.
“Gotcha.” I said.
“Huh?” The Mexican replied.
“Nothing.” I went back to the questions.
When I finished I took a moment to reflect on why some of us do our jobs. Not in a traditional sense. Besides the money, some jobs have to be done and it's really about who we are and why we put ourselves through certain tasks.
“You're here for a work injury, right?” The Mexican asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“A one-hundred and ten pound girl punched me in the face. Below the chin, right on the jawline.”
“Wow. You work at a hospital?” She asked. I was in my scrubs, I came straight from work.
“Yeah. It's a Psych Hospital. The one up the street.”
“You work at Sleeping Meadows?!”
“Yeah.”
“Man, we get lots of you guys in here. It's pretty crazy there. I don't know how you do it.” I barely did it.
My last paycheck was so small from calling off sick, I had to borrow money from a friend. I wondered how she did it. The Mexican looked as if she hated her job. I hated my job and for some fucked up reason had no intention of changing it.
We are our own worst enemies.
That night I slammed a guy my size to the floor, he attempted to strangle me. But still everybody had their silly tragedies. The warehouse workers told me they had hard days too. The customer service reps tried to preach the hell of their jobs. I once had a record store cashier tell me his days were tough.
My response to these were always the same: 'Things are rough all over.' 'No job is easy.' But it was bullshit. Warehouse guy never had to look over his shoulder for a three hundred pound mad man coming at him with a fist or chair. Customer service chick never had to hold down the girl that punched her in the jaw, so that she could get injections in her ass. And record store guy never had a Hepatitis C infected person spit in his eye at work.
Then there was the lady I was with at the time. The cunt with her cushy computer desk job, the one who's reply to my complaining about a hard night was: 'YOU CHOSE to work in that environment. So stop complaining. YOU CHOSE it.' My reply was always: 'Can't a man fucking vent after a long violent night?' She would then continue to try and one up my job with her trivial mundane work life and how hard she had it as the only female in an office full of sexist men.
All the men in her office were sexist because she was not treated as an equal. I had tried on numerous occasions to explain to her that if she kept being a cunt, the men were going to go against her. She would then slam my front door and attempt to burn rubber as she drove away.
I was done with my paper work and I turned it in to the Mexican. An ex gang member in a white lab coat lead me to a room where he took x-rays of my face from multiple angles. He then asked me to sit and wait for the doctor. I did so and thought about the events that lead me to this point.
The girl was psychotic. She ran through the hallways of Sleeping Meadows screaming something about someone named Marie Antoinette and something about eating cake. My job was to prevent her from hurting herself, others, or going into male patient rooms. She was a quick one too and with my size it was becoming harder to keep up.
She bolted left into a male patient's room, I was right on her tail, inside the room she threw herself face down on the bed. Luckily the male occupying that room was at group therapy. I verbally gave her a directive to get up from the bed and leave the room. She stood up, staggering, her eyes closed and head down. I leaned down to her a bit due to my height. Right there in front of god and the pasty blue walls she balled up her fist, with her eyes closed, landed a solid right hook right on the sweet spot.
She ran out of the room as the world went hazy for a split second and I too stumbled a bit. The pain shot like electricity from the jawline straight to my temples. I immediately became nauseous, I wondered what was happening to me as the result of a punch from a kitten. She was merely some child compared to my size and strength.
But that was that.
The one-hundred and ten pound little girl had managed to send two-hundred and eighty pounds to the clinic due to concern. And that was something the average working Joe would never understand. I would've made a terrible boxer. I wondered what fate would have bestowed me if the man my size had punched me instead of merely trying to strangle me.
Would I have lost teeth? Would I have actually lost consciousness and hit the cold hard linoleum? These questions panicked me, made me feel less as a man. I reminded myself to get into a bar fight after I left the clinic or go hunting or shave with a Bowie knife by a campfire. Anything to regain that testosterone rush.
The doctor broke my train of thought when he entered the room. I sat on a strip of paper covering vinyl cushioning. My feet dangled inches above the floor, I felt fucking five years old.
“Hi, Mr.-” The doc said.
“Thomas.” I said.
“Yes. Preston Thomas. How is your jaw doing?”
“I was hoping you could tell me, Doc.”
“Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins.” He said with genuine friendliness. I assumed he was from the Midwest. Southern California didn't breed these type of manners. “I reviewed your x-rays and it appears you have a minor fracture. That's what is causing a majority of your pain, also a slight case of TMJ.”
“Wait. I understood fracture, but the other thing.”
“Temporomandibular Joint Disorder. This is inflammation caused by the punch. How big was the patient?”
“Probably about five-five, five-six. She weighed about one-hundred and ten pounds.”
“She? Hmm. How much do you weight?” Jenkins asked. I felt that insecurity creep up.
“About two-eighty.”
“And you're how tall?” It bothered me that he wasn't writing any of it down, didn't have a pen or a clipboard in his hands.
“About six foot three inches.” I said.
“Well, she got you good.”
“Yeah.” I said, my jaw killing me.
“Well, I'll recommend a good surgeon for that fracture, I know a guy over at Hope Memorial.”
“Excuse me?” I said, sounding more panicked than I wanted to.
“Pain killers are only a temporary relief. We won't have to wire it, but it will require surgery.”
“O.K.” I said, knowing very well I would not be giving his surgeon buddy a call.
Jenkins wrote me a prescription for pain killers, it was going to be free through workman's compensation. He called my supervisor and told him I wouldn't be in for a week on a count I was going to need surgery.
I stepped out from the clinic into the cold. My jaw instantly screamed in agony. I grit my teeth and walked to the run down car that was mine. I hit the pharmacy, filled the prescription. Drove four miles to a cat named Stevie. I knew he was in the market for those type of pills. I charged him double what they were worth because he didn't know any better.
I hit a liquor store with the fistfuls of cash and bough
t my real medicine. Whiskey. Beer. I went home and drank away my jaw pain. The damned thing would heal eventually. Hell, cavemen didn't have surgeons and they lived. It was the cold that they feared.
Fuck it, I have a space heater, I thought.
With the final sip of my first bottle of wine, I drifted to a place where pain didn't exist, where my job didn't exist. The place where everyone was sane and happy. Where life was good all the time. My imagination. But I couldn't sleep.
So I popped open a beer, poured a glass of whiskey, and I wrote this.
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