by Rob Sedgwick
I looked at Hank and then remembered Nikko and Milo and what Linus did to them. How awful, how horrible, and how silent. How we never talked about it for all this time, and now Linus’s pending death, and how, sometimes, what goes around in life comes around. But I didn’t feel angry or vindictive. Nor did I feel the need to say anything out loud. Soon Linus would be dead, and that would be that. He would have had a brief, sad, and lonely life without a partner, without children, without any positive impact on the world to speak of, a life that added up to, at the end of the day—that bleakest, blankest word in the English language—nothing.
Hank continued, “He’s been spittin’ up blood all the time, and a couple of times I found him passed out in the house. Ya’ know he loves you. I know you know that, but I just thought it was good ta’ say it.”
He took another moment to watch the Hudson, and it seemed as if he was considering life and its brevity, its toughness, its meanness. We were both quiet. It was humbling to see this almost brute of a guy, one who easily survived Rikers Island, capable of being so defenseless.
Then he said, “Anyway, that’s it. Sad. Sad way to end a life.”
Linus came out of the house balancing a platter of hors d’oeuvres and bottles of wine for the guests who’d soon be arriving. Other than his horrible cough, watching him, you would have no idea he was going to die soon. “Hank, stop filling the poor boy’s head with your macho claptrap. Rob, my dear boy, I have to tell you—I had a premonition in the kitchen. You’re going to be fine.”
Linus had picked the Yankees to overtake the Red Sox in ’78, though he had no knowledge of baseball. In the nail-biting one-game playoff against Boston, he’d assured me all would be well.
“You simply don’t belong in jail, and that is merely that. And for pot, of all things, my goodness, to make such a to-do—so childish. Silliest thing I have ever heard!”
Looking at him closely now, I could see his eyes were yellowish, his skin pasty white, but his energy was somehow still explosive, vibrant, filled with his own particular life-loving glee even with death around the corner.
“I hope you’re right, Linus.”
“Of course I’m right, dear boy. I’m just so devastated for your poor mother. I love her so much. What a wonderful woman.”
Linus would die in his cottage in less than two months. Alone. No one from our circle would attend his service. This was the last time I would ever see him.
—
“He said that I am a wonderful woman!” My mom was driving me to an audition. She was absentmindedly anxious, nattering on about a client.
“Yes, Mom, you are a wonderful woman.”
“He said I am a brilliant therapist! He was going to kill himself, that it was certain, and I made him change his mind.”
“I’m sure you did, Mom.”
“I threw in a monkey wrench.”
“Yes.”
“Yes I did, and that monkeyed around with his ideas.”
“Yes.”
“His ideas of himself.”
“Yes.”
“Of his life.”
“Yes.”
“And of death.”
“Yes.”
“His death.”
“Ye—”
“His potential suicide. How embarrassing. How selfish. I threw in a monkey wrench. I saved his life. Me, me, me, your mother.”
“I bet you did, Mom. Linus sends his love, by the way.”
“Linus sends his love? So sweet. Crazy as a loon. Left us because he didn’t want to be a slave. ‘Mrs. Heller, I’m so sorry, but I feel like I’m a slave.’ He actually said that to me. Such nonsense. I still love him dearly, but really. We’re all slaves. To compromise. Did he cook?”
“Yep.”
“Amazing chef. Was he drunk?
“We had a couple of cocktails, I guess.”
“Blow me over with a feather. I think I saved his life as well. He’s suicidal too, you know. So gorgeous over there. One of the great enclaves, almost private. So no one else can come in. Did you know that his grandfather was one of the leading breast surgeons in the country, in the world?”
“Yes, Mom, I know.”
“Remarkable. Speaking of remarkable, your sister might win an award for that movie of hers that just came out. Or she should anyway. She never wins the BIGGIE. Poor baby, I don’t know how she does it. Putting on a happy face all the time.”
“Mom, she’s very rich and very famous and basically does only great projects that she wants to do and gets awards all the time.”
“I know, but she doesn’t get enough awards for it. It’s a constant monkey on our back.”
“I know.”
“Oh well, life is a rat race. Any auditions for you lately?”
“Well, that’s what you’re taking me to right now.”
“Anything good?”
“Not really.”
“They usually aren’t. Life is filled with ups and downs. Mostly downs.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter much anyway, what with sentencing being around the corner and all.”
“Well, thank God for Ben is all I can say.”
“Yes.”
“He is amazing! Always there in a crisis!”
“Yes.”
“Where there is catastrophe, he is rescue. Where would we be without him?”
“I don’t think he’s ever listened to a word I’ve said.”
“Well, you can’t have everything rolled into one blanket. Your own father didn’t come through. Didn’t even show up. What a mess he is. That would be that.”
“Yup.”
“What a remarkable waste of potential. We were such an amazing team, he and I. Nothing, not an earthquake, could have kept us down. But then he left us for a lousy fucking stewardess.”
“Didn’t last long, though.”
“Serves him right. It all serves him right. God, you look just like him.”
“So they say.”
“I mean, sweetheart, it’s eerie. The spitting image. So, dinner tomorrow night. Your Uncle Roseybird is coming into town. You have to be there. It’s a command performance.”
“Okay.”
“And we’re going to have it at Eighty-Fifth Street. Where you soiled the nest.”
“Yes, I did, Mom. I did. I besmirched it.”
“Yes, you most certainly did. Jesus Christ on a raft. I still can’t believe it.”
“Mom, this is it, right up here.” She brought the car to a stop.
“Okay. Here you are. Seven o’clock tomorrow night. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t forget to pick up the chopped chicken liver at Williams Bar-B-Que.”
“I won’t, Mom, you know me.”
“No sweetheart, I don’t know you. I don’t know you at all.”
35
I twist the shit out of my ankle playing touch football while at Bennington. I can’t walk. I go to the infirmary, and the doctor tells me to ice it and gives me a cane. And when he says ice it, the doctor says he means to immerse the ankle in a bucket of ice and water for twenty minutes, then take it out until the ankle thaws out, then repeat again for twenty minutes. He says the ligaments are so twisted it would have been better if I had broken it.
So to cure what ails me, I take the bus back to New York City to ice the ankle there, hang out with my brother and friends, get plastered, and put my foot up. I get especially crocked that night because my ankle is killing me. It works, kind of, but I’m still in a lot of pain. One of the girls we’re hanging out with at Trader Vic’s, who’s friends with Nikko and Seth, is attractive and I want to fuck her. I want to make a move. Nikko and Seth both whisper to me that her body might look good in a dress, but she is gorilla hairy without the dress on and I will be grossed out. I
’m so drunk I don’t think I will care, but Nikko says, “Believe me, you will care.”
So we decide to flee Trader Vic’s and cross Park Avenue into the safety and luxury of the Ritz Tower. And it is a Tower, a cloud-piercing tower. And it is Ritzy, a monument to wealth. Even though the entrance is stone and iron, the façade—taken as a whole and from several paces back—is soft and beckoning. It is something that most on this earth would want to aspire to.
I hobble to keep up with Nikko, who has just basically leapt over the little island that goes all the way down Park Avenue.
I hop onto the island on my good leg, my bad ankle dangling. I totter mushily over the squishy soil to the other side of the small island and get to the steep cement step. I am about twenty paces from the front door.
A car is coming from about a block away. It’s coming fast.
At least I don’t have a driver’s license yet. It’s gotten into my numbskull head over the years that cars are deathtraps unless you have your shit together. At the rate I drink, I would be dead in a week.
The car is still barreling up the avenue. New York is a pedestrian’s town. All cars know this in New York. Or they should know it. I know it. This car should know it too. It will know it, of course, but it seems to be taking its sweet time.
Other people get hit by cars, but not me. I’ll be fine.
There is a sudden rush of a hunk of speeding metal that would flatten anything in its path, and then a click. But was there a click? I remember a click. But what would the click be about? Did it hurt? I can’t remember because it was so fast. A blink.
I’m on my back on the ground, seven steps from the Ritz Tower. That click, or the struggle to remember it, stone-cold sobers me.
It starts to drizzle as if on cue. The rain goes into one eye and makes the sky blurry. My legs have been hit so hard I can’t feel them. This could be really bad. I want to move them, but what if they don’t move? What if I’m crippled? How stupid. Why didn’t I fuck that girl? Who cares how hairy she was?
Nikko runs to me, crying. He throws his head into my chest. He must think I’m dead. I tell him I love him too, but “why don’t you call an ambulance?” He rises off my chest and says, “Oh,” and the rest of his expression says that getting an ambulance is a great idea and why didn’t he think of that?
A crowd gathers.
I’d love to be able to move. I wonder if I’ll be able to move again. For some reason I feel calm, resigned. The concierge comes out with a blanket. The specter. He knew it all the time. Maybe he’ll read me my last rites. Do I still owe him fifty bucks?
I’m so limp, floppy. Useless. A doll. I tense my lips to remind myself not to be so relaxed. My dad told me that once he was skiing with some woman and they got lost and it got dark, but he wouldn’t let her sleep because he knew she would freeze to death. He kept hitting her with the ski pole to keep her going.
I will not sleep and die. I grit my teeth, open my eyes wide so sleep is impossible, and stare at the night.
The crowd makes way. The ambulance guys move me gently onto the gurney and lift me into the ambulance.
“My brother has to come with me, my brother, please let my brother come.”
Nikko holds my hand and keeps saying, “I’m here.” It’s the middle of the night, and we’re at Lenox Hill in about three minutes.
We are whisked through, first class all the way, straight back to the emergency room. The rookie doctors are on me immediately. I tell Nikko to keep close by. They look me over.
“Are you going to have to cut off my legs?”
“No, we’re not going to have to cut off your legs.”
I didn’t want to fall asleep and wake up with no legs.
“You just have to pee for us.”
I whisper to Nikko that whatever they do, don’t let them cut off my legs.
I can’t piss. I hear them behind the hospital curtains saying, “I’ve seen this kind of thing before, and we’re going to have to cut off his legs.”
Then they come from behind the curtain and ask for my piss.
“I can’t pee. Could you please leave me here alone with my brother for a second, and maybe it’ll happen.” I tell Nikko to turn on the faucets. “Call Mom and Ben and get them down here, and whatever you do, don’t let these guys cut off my legs until they get here.”
“You think they’re going to cut off your legs?”
“I don’t know, but get Mom and Ben down here.”
Two nurses who are talking about their dating lives take me into the X-ray room. They take off my clothes and leave me on the X-ray table for what seems like hours. I am freezing to death in a crooked position and can’t move. When I call out for help and listen for a response, there is nothing but the hum of the building. There is something sticky on the side of my head and it feels cold. I jiggle my head. It’s my blood. When the nurses come back, they are still talking about their dating lives. I’m shivering. I ask may I please have a blanket I’m freezing.
One nurse says, be quiet.
Before they take the X-rays, they have to manipulate my legs so the machine can photograph them properly. The pain is beyond any I have ever experienced, but it’s so cold I keep flexing my upper body and stomach muscles to generate some heat.
36
I ran into Seth at an ATM on Fourteenth Street. His hair was cropped high, and he was wearing a double-breasted suit that could only be described as Zoot.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
“Yhes.”
“I’m so sorry how everything went down. I didn’t really have a choice.”
“I suppose nod.”
“I feel so terrible.”
“We all have to make choices in life.”
“I feel so terrified, but I’m also really angry and intolerant. This sounds stupid, but I fantasize that I’m a soldier in the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, and every time I see a really fat—and I mean really fat—person, I imagine taking out my imaginary Luger and blowing their brains out.”
“You and your imaginary fwends.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re always like that. You were nevah one to rein in your fantasies.”
“But I don’t discriminate, it’s fat people of all shapes and sizes of fat.”
“Ids also good your fantasies aren’t historically accurate. Othawize you would have killed most of your fwends by now.”
“Jordan told me about the wiretap thing in Central Park.”
“I figgered something was up. Jordan was more jumpy than usual.”
“But weren’t you scared? Jordan also told me about the DA threatening you, and…aren’t you a little nervous about all this?”
“I guess. But I figger life has enough tensions and catastrophes that are awl out of my control. At the end of the day, awl this will seem relatively minah. Plus, they nevah got anything on me, so that makes my position a lot easiah. But you take everything very personally. You get too emotionally involved in everything. Id must be really eggsauwsting.”
“Yeah, it is. Plus, I’m getting sentenced pretty soon, so that’s kind of…blikes!”
“What’s the worst you’re looking et?”
“Lawyers say about a year.”
“That’s nod so bad. You can read. Bettah yet, you should learn to meditate.”
“Hopefully I won’t have to. I got to say, you’re annoyingly calm.”
“Wehl, with my language issues, I’ve had to learn patience. But ids sucked for me, too. I think I’m moving to Brazil fow a while.”
“Why?”
“I feel like I’m in this Bugs Bunny episode wheah Elmer Fudd is perpetually out to shoot me wherevah I turn. Too much turmoil. I need harmony, a more Casbah-like envianmint.”
“Will you take me there?”
“Wheah?”
�
�To the Casbah.”
“Your jokes are always very convensunal, you know that?”
“And your geographical references are terrible. The Casbah is in like Tangiers or someplace, not Brazil.”
“You see, so literal. I wuz referring to the Casbah-like envirnmint I yearn fowa, nod the Casbah itself.”
“You wanna get a beer?”
“Nah. I haff to go to this pardy. Why do you think I’m wearing this ridiculous suit?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I didn’t want to look like a piranha.”
“Pariah.”
“Whatevah.”
37
Finally my own private room in the hospital, and I still have my legs. Mom and Ben are there waiting for me with Nikko. Everyone looks mighty grim. I’m happy to get away from the evil nurses and loopy on Demerol. The room is clean and lovely. How lovely. How light and lovely do I feel on Demerol. I’m deposited onto a bed with crisp white sheets, but one of the orderlies has to pull the sheets up over my legs because I still can’t move them. I can feel them, or at least I could feel them before because they were in such excruciating pain, so I suppose that’s a good thing because it means at least I am not crippled, but the air in the room is thick with gloom, so I’m not out of the woods by any stretch. A nurse enters to help me get set up.
Mom: How do you feel?
Me: Great. Never better. Stop crying.
Ben: What happened?
Me: I walked into a speeding car.
Ben: How, son?
Nikko: We were going to Lexington Avenue for some Bosco to make chocolate milk, and then…
Ben: (Ignoring Nikko) Why did you walk into a speeding car?
Me: Because it was there!
Ben: I think you’re going to be here for a while. Thank God you’re alive.
Me: And thank God for whatever it is they just shot me up with! What the hell is it? Whoohoo!
Nurse: Demerol.
Me: That’s terrific. Best stuff I’ve ever had! God’s nectar. I feel all yummy.
