Mercifully, Special Olympics yells “GULL” at the top of his lungs, clapping and wheezing wildly, creating a rather magnificent diversion. Saving my ass.
“For christ’s sake can someone close the goddamn curtain!” is all Sig says.
Then they close the blue curtain between us.
I shoot Special Olympics what I hope is a look of sincere gratitude … he smiles so big it looks like his mouth might split his face.
“I gotta get in there,” I whisper shout up my Bluetooth.
“Are you nuts?” I hear Little Teena growl.
“There’s no fucking way I’m missing this goddamn it,” I snap.
Then we all hear a weird whisper shriek in our ears coming from Ave Maria at her cart. “Use the monkey! Use the monkey! I slit its throat and stuffed a mini spy cam in its head!”
I look down at the mug in my hand. Big-headed monkey. Get well soon. Sure enough, there’s a camera lodged in its head, its eye poking out of the deranged monkey mouth. But how to get the thing in Sig’s stall? Suddenly it seems obvious.
I look at Special Olympics.
He looks at me.
We have an unspoken understanding. He wanted in on it from the get-go. He’s not fucking up our shit. He’s a motherfucking player. I nod at him. His face goes serious and he puts his head forward and clenches his jaw. Faster than you can say “human tard bomb” I chuck the monkey mug into Special Olympics’ lap. He grips the arms of his wheelchair and puts his head down, ready for action. Orderlies are on the horizon down the hall. I grab the handles of his vehicle and shove his wheelchair as hard as I can until he shoots through the blue curtain right into Siggy’s stall.
All hell breaks loose as they try to get the poor kid out of there. But he’s playing his part to the hilt – he’s shoving the monkey mug at Sig’s groin shouting “Get well soon! Get well soon!” Louder and louder. He’s unstoppable. He’s beautiful. He’s a goddamned natural. One of the nurses tries to get the monkey mug from Special Olympics but his grip is superhuman. “Get well soon!” he wails.
“Get this moron away from me,” Sig screeches, and since the curtain is wide open again I see Sig’s hospital gown is all hiked up and there it is – his high-rise wang – looking, I must say, much younger than I expected. Not gray-skinned or wrinkled up at all. Red. Enormous. Monstrously virile. Kinda smells like hot dogs.
My esteemed wheelchair colleague is literally shoving the mug at Sig’s dick. But the dick does not yield. Finally a nurse manages to pry the mug loose from his grip. “That’s OK now,” she’s saying to my boy. “Isn’t that nice of you,” she lies, petting his head. “How thoughtful you are,” in the most condescending yet creepily authoritative voice. I briefly consider stabbing her with a fork. Then she wheels my man-boy decoy back out into the hall where the gaggle of orderlies secure their suspect.
Special Olympics is applauding wildly. What a performance. Fuck it. You gotta give the guy his props. I know it’s a risk, but I don’t care. I walk straight up to him like I’ve known him all my fucking life. “Comrade,” I announce.
“GULL,” he sings up at me.
I raise my hand up in the air in front of him.
He raises his.
I high five him a hard one, then salute, clicking my heels when I turn to leave.
As I walk away I whisper, “Everybody fall back. Rendezvous at the Jag. Go.”
Ave Maria wheels her cart around the corner and abandons it. Little Teena thanks the ER desk ladies for their time. Obsidian rests her mop against a wall and walks away. I stand up and run soap opera dramatic style down the hall like an emotionally distraught woman unable to take it anymore. Wherever they are taking my bellowing lad, at least he had this.
In the parking lot inside the Jag we all four hunch around the laptop, its LCD light glowing up at us. On the screen, Sig’s ER room looks fish-eyed and claustrophobic. And you can see some monkey fur around the edges of the shot.
“Fuck almighty,” Little Teena says, “it looks like we’re looking through a vag.”
What we see next is a silver needle that looks big enough to be a rhino tranquilizer gun. The white coat points it at Sig’s dinger.
“Good christ,” the little cartoon Sig shouts from the computer screen.
“Holy fuck,” Obsidian says.
“Youch,” Ave Maria says, sticking her hands behind the bib of her candy striper uniform.
I just feel … itchy. A little like I’m watching a senior shit himself. My upper lip sweats. My head is too heavy with Farrah. And for some weird reason? My twat is throbbing.
When they stick the needle into his cock his face seizes up like his penis might blow fire. I suck in air and clench my hands between my legs. He closes his eyes and groans and sways. He grips the sides of the gurney. The skin of his member is red and purple and swollen. My head hurts. My ears are hot. Sig moans and throws his head back. I see blood suck up the throb of his cock and slowly travel into the hull of the syringe. I pull my hair.
What. The. Fuck. I’m all creamy. Like need a new pair of panties.
The word “shunt” gets batted about by the doctor and nurses. There’s a flurry of white as they spring into action. Sig shouts “Why don’t you goddamned medievalists just use leeches?” He’s attempting to flee the scene. Blue-suited almost-nurses are holding him down. I realize I’m gripping my own thighs hard enough to leave marks.
“Can you zoom in?” I say, surprised by the coldness of my own voice.
I watch the scalpel inch closer to the head of his penis. As the blade carves a tiny red smile into the tip of his dick, Sig screams bloody murder.
Ave Maria hits a high note.
The urologist gasps.
“FUCK!” I shout.
Sig’s cock – I shit you not – shoots blood across the room, a jet of red spraying the white coat of the Dr. A tiny blob of it making it all the way to the monkey camera. Ew.
Now I know why we need the word bellow in the English language, because the sound that comes out of Sig? Bellow.
There is a moment of silence inside the Jag.
“Cut,” I say. “Open the goddamn windows.” We all take deep breaths.
“Ida,” Obsidian goes.
“That’s a wrap,” I say, rubbing my hands together and wiping sweat off of my upper lip. “Did you guys see that shit? That was some fucked up shit.” My voice sounds a little manic. I’ve got strange business in my underwear. Ave Maria is rocking and humming “The StarSpangled Banner,” softly.
“Ida,” Obsidian repeats.
“Let’s blow this pop stand,” I say, but Obsidian grabs my head in her hands and points my face toward the window of the Jag. “What?” I say. “We gotta get this footage on a timeline.” I notice my voice and hands are shaking.
“Ida,” she says, holding my big Farrah head in her hands, and then she gently turns my head and directs my gaze to a man on a gurney being unloaded from an ambulance next to us, “Isn’t that your dad?”
14.
IT’S HARD TO LOOK AT YOUR DAD WHEN HIS SKIN IS THE color of cigarette ash. It’s hard to watch him fighting to breathe right with hospital crap all up his nose and stuck to his face and chest.
Mostly though it’s hard to wait the long wait of emergency rooms. There’s nothing – and I mean nothing – to “do”. You sit on the shitty-ass Naugahyde chairs and read the shitty-ass Home Decorating and Sailing and Newsweek magazines and watch time stop. The clocks are fucked. They don’t move like regular clocks, I swear.
The other people here look like shit on a stick, too. Bags under their eyes and hope shoved a little too high up in their chests. They hold Styrofoam cups of dirt-tasting coffee and wear the same clothes for days. Their hair looks like utter fuck. The women stop wearing makeup and the men stop shaving.
I can see my Farrah wig shoved down into the bottom of my backpack. Mere hours ago I directed the action. Now I just feel about two feet shorter and like my mouth is filled with metal. I think I bit my fuck
ing tongue. Without my Farrah wig, I feel like somebody’s lame-ass bald little sister. Christ. I bet they all think I’m a chemo case.
My father’s heart attacked him.
I know I’m saying it bassackwards but it seems more honest this way. In a regular heart attack, the blood supply to the heart gets hosed. Heart cells die. In my dad’s case, I think there’s more to it.
My ass vibrates. It’s Little Teena. He texts: “r u ok?” I stare at my iPhone in my hand. My hand is shaking. Great. I’m not even eighteen and I’m already a middle-aged neurotic. I text back: “ok. e.r. sux. need vcdn.”
Emergency rooms. Yeah. I try to remember the layout from earlier. Surely there’s away to score something around here. Where where where did I see the single-dose medicine cabinet?
This waiting room smells like day-old fart. Unfortunately, there’s a loser across from me in the waiting room whose coping mechanism is nonstop talking. I cut shapes into the sides of my cup of dirtwater with my fingernails. I try not to clock the ass-wipe across from me blathering on about how his wife wants to raise their kid so much differently than him. His wife he’s separated from. Jesus did she make the right move.
“It’s about values,” comes out of his pie hole. “You gotta get your kids’ minds right early.”
This guy wants to send his kid to a Christian Khmer Rouge camp. I swear to god, if there was a god, I’d kick this jack-asstic Christian motherfucker straight in the nuts. But there is no god. If there’s anything, it’s an anti-god. With a very perverse sense of humor.
I’d go back in to see my dad but I have to do it in little doses. It makes me feel like crap. The sounds of hospital gadgets. The smell of beating back death. Besides, his head looks weird all hooked up to hospital crap.
I’M SIX.
I am with my father at the edge of an estuary that is a bird sanctuary. Marshlands and birch and ferns stretch out before us, divided by small cool streams weaving through grasses and sand.
My father reaches into his brown-brushed corduroy father pants that smell like Irish Spring soap and Good Life cologne – a sharp spicy amber fragrance that lends itself to a blend of citrus, lavender, sweet spices, and sandalwood I know from reading the label in his man bathroom when he’s not there – he reaches into his pocket and pulls something out and says “I have a present for you.”
My father gives me a Kodak Instamatic Camera. I know because he puts his father pointer finger under each word and then we say the words together: “Kodak. Instamatic. Camera.”
“This is not a toy,” he says to me, and he puts the yellow and black box with red and blue writing on it and a tiny black eye into the smallness of my hands. I feel very serious. Or I try to.
This is how you hold it up and look through the little viewing square.
This is how you pan for the shot--you want to pretend you are making a box around what you see – that’s how the picture will turn out.
This is the button you push to take the shot – here – listen – hear the “click?”
Then after, this is how you advance the film – see this little dial – you put your thumb on it like this – you try it – yes, like that, and keep rolling it forward until it stops.
Then you are ready for your next picture.
They are instructions. Suddenly I want him to say them all over again. Again. Again. Ordering the world.
He squats down even lower so that he’s kid eye level and I hold the camera up to my eye and he reaches his long father arm out before us toward the land and says, “OK, now you can choose for yourself what to shoot.”
“Shoot?” I say, dropping the camera down.
“Take a picture. It means take a picture.”
I turn toward him and point my head and the camera right at him and he starts to laugh and he says, “No, Ida, you can take a picture of ANYTHING out here, not me, not me …” but I take pictures of him laughing, of his ear, of his chin. His eye and the top of his head. His shoes. Now we are both laughing.
Then he picks me up and puts me up on his shoulders and says, “OK, OK,” and still kind of laughing he says, “Shoot.”
I do. I shoot everything in the whole world.
A LOT HAS happened since I was six.
I wish my dad’s head would look normal again is all.
My cell vibrates. Ave Maria. “hwz ur dad?” How is he. I stand up to go check. My head swims. I sit back down and grip my iPhone. “Alive” I text. Then I see a flash of beige.
My mother hovers into my father’s room like a ghost. Even I can barely tell when she’s there, when she’s not. She wears off-white pants and a blonde sweater. Trust me when I say she blends in with the earth-toned décor. I shadow her. I stand just outside his stall, out of view. She doesn’t say anything to him. She leans over close to his face like she’s going to softly pet his skin or kiss him. But she doesn’t do either. She just leans in close to his face and closes her eyes, then presses the sides of her hair back.
I’M TWELVE.
The front door of the condo opens and there is a tree with white flowers standing there. No, it’s my father coming home from work with an armful of lilies for my mother. He peeks around the ginormous bouquet and he is smiling. He is smiling so big his face looks weird.
She is not.
She has been running the back of her hand over the keys of the baby grand she has not played for years. In her other hand is a scotch on the rocks. Which to me has become one word: scotchontherocks.
His happiness lives in his pants.
Briefly I wonder if he smells like Mrs. K. in his pants. The lilies scent obliterates anything.
I’m in the kitchen getting a Coke. I can see them through the kitchen door opening in the living room. His happy head pushes the enormous bouquet of sickeningly sweet smelling flowers all up into her face.
She embraces them like she might a child, and for a second, I think I see color back in her eyes. The corner of one side of her mouth twitches briefly. I’m standing there riveted, my Coke midair, my mouth hanging open, watching the scene of them.
It’s wrong.
His happy head.
Pants.
It’s his pleasure that’s the death of her.
Slowly, like as slowly as twelve-year old possible, I slide my iPhone out from my back pocket with my free hand. I lift it up, set it to film, aim it at them. But twelve-year olds are gawky and awkward, so my mother sees me move out of the corner of her eye just as I hit the little red record button.
“Ida, don’t,” she says, holding the giant flowers in front of her head.
Then she sort of “flees” – runs out of the frame. Room I mean. In my hand she looks like a woman with a floral head where her human head should be, dashing to safety. I hear the bedroom door close from down the hall.
Then it’s just my father and the scent of something too sweet still lingering in the room.
Like childhood.
I GO BACK to the room where people wait for bad shit to happen. Jeez.
The weirdest part though is that Mrs. K. is here too. She makes sure to go into his room when my mother is not there, when my mom is down getting some godforsaken fake food from the cafeteria or going for a walk down the maze of hospital hallways. What, is she casing the joint? I can’t figure out where she’s hiding out. Visually though, she’s pretty much the opposite of my mom. Mrs. K. has flaming red hair. A lot of it. Like mythic. Mrs. K. has a full, round, heart-shaped ass. My mom’s ass slid down her hamstrings years ago. Mrs. K. has big tits – like 1950s big tits. My mom’s tits are slowly attempting to hide in her armpits like frightened fried eggs.
My mom knows Mrs. K. is there. She does. But she has so perfected her denial that she can go deaf and blind at a moment’s notice. If I think about all this much longer I’m going to barf in the lap of Christian blabberpuss. I watch my mother walk right past me and down one of the halls Special Olympics so recently travelled. I hope he takes care of her.
OF COURSE the Sig scene
is in my head. By now he’s probably home vacuum breathing a table full of blow to ease his wang pain. To be honest? I kind of wish I was with him. How weird is that?
Dirt water coffee suddenly soaks my crotch. I cut a fingernail chimp face in the Styrofoam cup and now it’s everywhere. Christianpiehole stops talking for a second, looks at my wet crotch, smiles, then continues. All Christians are pervs.
Kind of I can’t breathe. Hospital air – did you know it’s all “contained” in the compound? There’s no such thing as fresh air in the compound. It’s recirculated and sterilized. Like in a spaceship. I make a break for the stairwell and the red letters of an exit sign. I stand on a little platform between floors outside and try to breathe like a normal fucking person. I close my eyes. For some goddamn reason I flash on an image of Mrs. K.’s luminous big ass. Briefly it seems light and easy to jump. Which makes me feel more dizzy. I slap my cheek as hard as I can. Youch. That’ll wake you up in the morning. Then I try to smile/grimace like a chimp.
That’s when I have my epiphany. The sick daughter has a sick father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who jumps the bones of the sick daughter.
That’s not the epiphany.
I re-enter the hospital compound. The meds in lots of E R areas are in a special cabinet containing medication bins and refrigerators that store limited quantities of medications in single-unit containers. You’d be surprised how often those cabinets and fridges are unattended. I mean it’s a busy place, the ER. So hijacking Vicodin is a piece of cake. Particularly if you have a Swiss Army knife special edition. One thing I’m good at.
After pocketing the velvet, I go into my father’s room. He looks dead. But he doesn’t sound dead. His breathing is what they call shallow and labored. Goddamn it, why are dads such a big fucking deal?
Me and my father in a room that smells like hand sanitizer and plastic barf bags. Before I realize what I’m doing I pull out my Zoom H4n outta my Dora purse. Before I can stop myself I place it close to his face. Turn it on. Adjust the levels.