Blood & Gristle

by Michael Louis Calvillo

So why quit?

  And why was crack so much worse than coke or weed or speed?

  Imagine the pandemonium if he was ever found out?

  He was a doctor, a medical doctor, disciplined, intelligent, (sort of) rich, and on and on and on. He’d lose his license. And respect. And credibility. But crack wasn’t any worse than the coke floating around or the dope being sold in the hospital parking lot or the soul connecting relationships few were lucky enough to have…it was better. There was no substitution and as far as John was concerned his daily regime would remain unchanged until the day he shuffled off of this mortal coil.

  So why quit?

  He found his one and only, his true love.

  Or so he thought.

  Patient 332562, Miranda Emmis, she of full, pretty lips, she of grade six heart palpitations, took a liking to John as he checked in on her. She feigned sleep and watched through slit eyes as the good doctor read her chart.

  He was handsome, a little sunken – but it was her understanding that hours upon hours of surgery would do that to a person. When he glanced up from the chart, she noticed a longing in his eyes and caught them mulling over her body appreciatively. It was every girl’s dream to marry a doctor (or so her mother said) and Miranda decided then and there that she would pursue a relationship with Dr. Stall.

  And she did, without much trouble.

  John had given up on associating with People anymore than he had to. This included romancing women. But here, out of the blue, this exciting creature wanted him, she put in the effort and didn’t make him work through those awkward stages of wonderment (does she like me?). Her interest reinvigorated his desires.

  Their consultations turned flirty. Miranda fluttered her eyes and pursed her lips and on the last day of her hospital stay she screwed up the courage and asked, “So what’s it take to get you to ask a girl out?”

  John smiled nervously, chuckled, ignored the question, and then carried on all doctorly and business like. Her heart murmur was fairly serious, a mid-systolic ejection murmur that thumped clearly without the aid of a stethoscope. Two back-to-back surgeries were necessary to repair the tearing brought on by the murmur. John scheduled her operation for the near future (six months) and told Miranda that she was free to go during the interim provided she stayed regular on her blood pressure medication and took it easy.

  Miranda persisted. John masked his nervousness with icy professionalism.

  Upon check out she flirted some more and then managed to convince him to give her his home number. “You know, should I have any medical concerns or, God forbid, emergencies.” She fluttered her hand over her heart and smiled winningly.

  Heat washed over and John went red. He felt about twelve years old. His struggle for composure brought on an embarrassing stutter. Tripping over words, he stopped trying to communicate and simply scribbled his number down and handed it over.

  He was surprised to hear from her that very evening. She asked him a bunch of questions about the surgery.

  “What’s a shunt?”

  “What are isovolumic contractions?”

  “What about scarring? Will I have much scarring?”

  John answered patiently, clinically.

  She called again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, and with each phone call the nature of her medical concerns grew more and more trivial.

  “What flavor puddings do the serve in the hospital?”

  “Visiting hours?”

  “If I take my car will it be safe in the parking lot?”

  Before long, conversation turned friendly, foregoing medical concerns all together. John fought a little and kept the standoffish routine going as long as he could.

  But she was beautiful and fun on the phone (he ordinarily hated the phone).

  But he was already committed, already in a loving, monogamous relationship.

  Crack wouldn’t understand.

  But Miranda kept on and worked herself into his daily routine.

  She called every night between ten and ten-fifteen. John still made his nightly drug runs, but made sure he was home to receive her. When on the phone, he pictured her lips moving in time with her words. Cracked out he found himself swimming in Miranda’s mouth. The sound of her voice waved over him like warmth, its timbre amplified by the rushing of the blood in his ears and the visceral bombardment of images permeating his brain. Crack was his sun and she, with her defective heart, her chatterbox verve, had won him over and become his moon, one drug eclipsing the other, confusing him, leaving him in darkness. He found himself falling in and out of love at the same time.

  Being Miranda’s surgeon, John had no business asking her out. It wasn’t illegal, but becoming emotionally involved with a patient was unethical. So was smoking crack before work, but then he could keep that to himself. Same with Miranda he supposed, and if he asked her to keep it between them she surely would, but as Benjamin Franklin once said, two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

  Given the increasingly personal nature of their phone conversations he offered to step down and recommend another surgeon. “Dr. Richardson is a fine surgeon. One of the best.”

  Miranda contested. “No way! You are the only one I trust!”

  She’d rather have him; she found the idea of his hands nursing her heart back to health extremely romantic. John’s chest swelled with feeling. A strong pulsation of emotion overrode weak ethical excuses. Her life was literally in his hands. She needed him. She wanted him. And he wanted to open her up and feel her warmth firsthand. At long last, he got up the nerve and asked her out.

  “Geez, what took you so long?” Miranda teased.

  Crack pretty much killed away his sexual appetite. He whacked off when necessary, facilitating arousal via empty fantasy or emptier porn. But rubbing his penis raw with dissatisfaction generally generated enough disgust to drive celibacy for months at a time.

  Eros returned, as it always did, and like always John thought he was game. Heeding his hunger, he gave in to pink fantasy, but then the pornography and the stale mental images in his head struck him cold while he desperately tried to feel something his solidarity would not allow. Alone, empty, naked, working himself over, feeble fantasy shattered and fool masturbation sickened.

  So what to do?

  He couldn’t hire a prostitute.

  Icky.

  The interaction frightened him. The women disgusted. The idea of paying for it did not sit well. Once he fell for crack, sex was one less thing he had to worry about. But now Miranda’s calls and the lingering vision of her luscious lips changed everything. She reawakened the fire in his groin, the yearning in his head, and for the first time in a long time, John could see crack as a substitution and not the other way around.

  Though sex regained its allure, Miranda was dead set on remaining virtuous. Their relationship (they had officially entered into a relationship), she insisted, needed to be built from the ground up. Sturdy foundations were essential. Sex could cloud one’s vision and right now the most important thing was clarity. John agreed, clarity was important, but so was sex. They were adults here, right?

  Did modern, dating adults wait to have sex?

  No, but he wasn’t about to jeopardize things by applying pressure. He hadn’t had sex in over five years, what was another six or seven months? They were adults and adults had sex, but if Miranda wanted to take it slow, he would take it slow.

  The waiting caused a considerable amount of distress. He felt like a fourteen-year-old kid trying to get laid for the first time. But then, he’d gone from recluse to love struck fool in about two month’s time. You had to learn to crawl before you walked. Still, desire was a powerful force. Prolonged hard-ons kept him at Miranda’s as late as he could stand just in case things happened. He even began missing his regular scheduled crack fixes and often found himself rushing from her place to the Skywest Apartments sweaty and panicked, blood aflame.

  The closer they got, the harder it was to hide
his addiction. He could see that his All-You-Need-is-Crack philosophy was destructive and stupid and wrong, but he wasn’t about to give it up. Not yet (like he could if he wanted). So he lied and lied and lied some more. He told her he suffered from insomnia. A prescription explained away the bursts of unhinged energy and the extreme talkativeness brought on by crack. Miranda asked him what he was taking and he made up some complex sounding combination of pharmaceutical jargon. She wondered about his surgical ability.

  Wouldn’t insomnia compromise skill?

  More lies, until she nodded and the frown pinching her eyebrows softened.

  Three months in, Miranda officially became his true love and crack his mistress. John ran a million miles an hour, divided, at odds with his inability to control himself and the beastly addiction. He wasn’t riding the drug, superior, enlightened, it was riding him. It was his mask. It was insulating him from the world, but it was also cutting him off. Pseudo-love. As Miranda started to mean something to him, the drug lost its luster.

  Late one night, they lay together intertwined, she, soft, love-secrets, he, a ball of nerves, astounded at how he could he have spent so many years so choleric and alone and figuring he was better off. The world and its inhabitants were an unruly lot. Good and bad, yin and yang, Tao of me, Tao of you, Tao of Pooh and on and on, but there was no need to withdraw.

  We all wore masks didn’t we?

  Who cared if Bob down the street, or Mary across the universe was evil or good or perverse or white bread?

  Who cared as long as the one you loved, the one nestled snuggly by your side, was unmasked?

  Miranda smiled at him big.

  I love you.

  Big smile.

  They’d just recently begun invoking those three little words. Gargantuan amounts of sentiment in that simple phrase. John liked the way it twisted her lips. He told her how he loved her lips, her mouth, and she cuddled closer. Her touch drove him crazy. He touched his fingers to her lips and told her about his hopes and dreams, his fixations and schemes (well, not all of them).

  One time back in college he brought a bag of lollipops with him to class and passed them out (he parted her lips and put a finger in her mouth). The whole class, a small class of about twenty students, each took one (he rolled his finger around her tongue sensually). They began sucking and slurping, ringing the sticky suckers in and out of their mouths, lips moist, sugary (he pushed his finger in and out, slow, sexy, in and out). He told her how he watched, eyes moving from mouth to mouth to mouth, glistening lips and tongues and he was about to tell her about the intense rush, the head swimming climax and the stained blue jeans, when she pulled away from him cold, spitting out his finger, disgusted with his oral fascination.

  Huge fight.

  Huge.

  Miranda called him a pervert, a sick-o, a sick fuck.

  And this is what he got for letting his guard down?

  Off comes the mask, out come the gloves?

  He was seconds away from confiding his deepest, darkest secret. The fetish primed the pump and he was ready to spill and tell her about his crack addiction. But she freaked out and pushed his finger out of her mouth like it was a tainted turd and John’s attempt at a cry for help went unheard because his girlfriend found his strange little oral fixation appalling.

  The fracas died off and things got back on track, but John made sure he was extra careful about what he said. There was absolutely no way he could tell Miranda about his crack habit. The mask would remain securely in place. The dilemma then was what to do about it?

  Continue, forever hiding that which someday was bound to come out?

  Or quit and try to forget about the past five years like it never happened?

  Enamored by the intensity and vigor of love, John opted to quit.

  When he stayed regular, high most of the day, he maintained fairly even. His moods swung sharply, but they did so predictably and he could get a handle on them and exert a bit of control. He’d been able to effectively fool Miranda since the beginning of their relationship, but when he attempted to quit, the charade wasn’t so easy to pull off.

  John’s behavior grew all the more erratic, so much so it was hurting his personal and professional life. The first night he planned on kicking he didn’t make it. He tried to hold off and stay with Miranda. Love would see him through. By four a.m. he was running for the door. His hasty departure didn’t bode well and once again John donned his liar’s cap and went to work on her. He was successful, but an ugly tension was calcifying between them.

  He finally managed to miss two days in a row. Crack free, but he was a hot mess: unkempt, red-rimmed leer, frazzled, and no matter how hard he tried to clean up and keep his composure his body ticked and fidgeted and sweat ran in droves. Stares at work, stares in the street, stares from Miranda. Suspicions reached an all time high and John’s constant jonesing only made things worse. That itch, that sting, that whatever it was, twisted up his guts, jack hammered his brain and drowned his thoughts in fluid panic.

  They were everywhere.

  They?

  They! Them! The world! Watching his every fucking move!

  John knew they’d turn on him.

  He knew it.

  He knew that love and its mellifluous clutches, its soothing, confusing tentacles, were wrapping around and into his chemistry only to trick him and rip his heart into a million pieces.

  Knew it all along, from day one, but went with it anyway, joining up like some brain picked cult member.

  No more.

  Driven by starvation, John went on the bender from hell. Four days later he woke up naked, lying on his kitchen floor, in a swamp of glass and alcohol. He was cut, surface nicks here and there, nothing serious, but the alcohol stung like mad. The last thing he remembered was purchasing a large sum of crack and smoking nonstop for an entire day. Once out, he went back to Sky West and scored another huge amount. Recollection dropped, but through the haze he could see Miranda, angry, crying, yelling, he could see a red, red frenzy of violence, no damage to her (at least he hoped), but broken liquor bottles, overturned furniture and general disregard for his worldly possessions.

  She was no longer speaking to him. John took twenty-four hours, secured himself a few more eights, and then called her up. She answered, heard it was him and then slammed the phone down. This went on for a while, until at long last he was able to convince her to hear him out. Nothing he said mattered. She knew about his problem and just like that she was done, just like that no more love, just like that it was over. John tried for weeks, but nothing ever came of it.

  Miranda threatened to call the hospital and tell administration everything she knew if John didn’t get her a new surgeon. She could have ratted about the crack and crushed his career to dust if she so desired and though it hurt like hell to lose her, John was thankful for her mercy. Once he got back on track and back to work, citing acute food poisoning as his reason for absence, he rescheduled the surgeries he missed during his bender and requested another doctor for patient 332562.

  The pain was unbearable. John truly loved her and it ached, but he survived; crack helped him through as it always had. The further he got, the more time for retrospection, the more certain he was that things were doomed to fail, four day bender or not. There was the lying and the drugs. Obvious. But what really struck him was that in order to live and share and grow with a person you loved, you had to regulate and calibrate every thought, every word, every facial expression. You had to swim in a sea of nuances. At least crack allowed him to be himself. It allowed him to feel nearly the same love dumb euphoria without all of the messy balancing acts.

  Screw it, he was the type of person who couldn’t just stand by and let the world have its way.

  Fuck it, he knew he was powerless to change what was written into our coding and so he chose, with even greater conviction than before, to disassociate himself completely.

  To hell with it, he’d work to live and live to get high.
<
br />   By the day of patient 332562’s operation, John had officially put her out of his head, but there was a pull inside that demanded closure. He couldn’t talk to her; he wouldn’t even know what to say.

  After the first day of her procedure she was wheeled to her room on a gurney. Heavy sedatives coursed her veins. She would be out until after her second surgery the following morning. Privy to this information, a plan formed. John smoked a little and then a little more and then in the small hours of the night he headed back to the hospital.

  Standing at her bedside, he felt a bit of that old love stirring in his chest. A strange pressure built in his head and a wave of nausea sent him to a knee. He stood, cleared up, and reached a shaky hand toward her. He touched her lips and rubbed his fingertips gently across them, in between them, around them. They were moist.

  He bent his face to hers and kissed her long.

  Butterflies danced in his stomach, snakes swam through his head. In a quick moment he removed his slacks and his underwear. Cool air tickled his genitalia. He kissed her again, working himself over with his hand. Hard, erect, he climbed onto the bed and straddled patient 332562. He moved up, balancing himself, the balls of his feet on either side of her neck as he lowered and touched the tip of his penis to her lips. Electric sparks set his inner eyes alight. John spun, trapped in an imagined vortex of pleasure and sin.

  Feverishly, he pried her mouth open and thrust the rest of himself inside. Miranda. The name big as death, as big as fear, as big as paranoia and for a snippet of time the world stopped. He floated, soared, embryonic rapture, the liquid of life embracing him. The heavens twisted and teased about his mortal form. Disclosing themselves, they removed their masks and sent rhapsodic vibrations of bliss throughout the wetwork of his nerves.

  He snuck from patient 332562’s bed, from the hospital room, from the hospital, anxious, looking over his shoulders, quick walking to his car.

  Consummation, finally consummation, but still a nagging imbalance; she had him inside of her, but he hadn’t had her inside of him.