by Tim Anderson
He walks back into the bedroom. The naked hobgoblin has sugar all over his face and torso. James looks around for clothing that he can negotiate onto the boy’s body before the EMS folk arrive. He sees a pair of Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup shorts on the floor and begins threading the boy’s feet through them.
“What’sgoingon?” The hobgoblin speaks!
“You were freaking out,” James says calmly. “Shaking and jerking. And you’re completely wet. How do you feel?”
“M’sorry.” Like clockwork, the crippling guilt is setting in.
“I called an ambulance.”
“Cancel.”
“Cancel?”
“Cancel. Don’t need.”
James walks out of the room and gets back on the phone.
Our hero looks down at his feet, then all around him. He wipes sweat from his brow and looks at his fingers. They’re glistening. And they taste great. Num num num.
“Mm-mm good. Mm-mm good,” he hums as he sucks every last crystal of sugar off every last finger.
“Meow,” says Stella. He looks over at her. She’s sitting on the hardwood floor staring directly at him with her giant orb eyes.
What a condescending, judgmental face.
“This quiche is pretty good,” Jimmy announced in his emotionless, deadpan way, as we sat on the balcony of Mordecai Manor with Dani eating brunch. “It’s almost as good as mine.”
He was really making quite an impression on this dear friend of mine he was hanging out with for the first time. Dani, who had made the quiche, smiled and, ever the diplomat, thanked him for his paper-thin praise.
“Wow,” she said. “Thanks, Jimmy. I’m glad you like it. I haven’t been so flattered since the time my dad called me a slut in high school.” Dani understood that Jimmy meant no harm. I’d warned her about his says-what-he-means-even-if-it’s-mean tendencies. And to be honest, his comment about the quiche was one of the most robust endorsements he’d given in a while. After all, he was very proud of his quiche-making abilities.
“Jimmy, we’re going to need to work on your complimenting skills when we get home,” I said. We’d only been together for a few weeks when I moved into the Wilmont. Over the past few months I’d been doing my best to make him understand that folks don’t live inside his own head like he does, so when he’s in a social situation and he wants to express himself verbally he needs to think not only about what he wants to say to someone but also about how the person would probably like to receive that information. Like saying “Nice haircut!” instead of “What happened to your hair?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, not missing a beat, “and right after that we’ll work on your not-having-sugar-attacks-in-the-middle-of-the-night skills.”
Dani looked at me and knew he’d won that particular exchange.
“Touché, Tim,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s got you there. Jimmy, I could write a book on it. I think it’d be called Tim’s Top Twenty Insulin Reactions of the ’90s. It will feature nudity.”
“I’ll write part two,” he said, and Dani laughed. It’s such fun when folks enjoy themselves at your expense.
“Seriously, though,” Jimmy said, looking straight at me. “You need to get your shit together. Because this…” He stopped.
“This…?”
“You just need to get your shit together.”
Bam. I tried to laugh off this comment, but I saw that Jimmy’s normally unreadable face was locked and loaded in the stink-eye position, pointed directly at me.
“Yeah, well, you need to…” I stammered. Jimmy looked at me with an “uh-huh, I need to what?” face. Now it occurs to me I should have recognized that face. Dress Jimmy in nursing scrubs, put a thermometer in his hand, and fit him with a brown, stringy, greasy head of hair and voilà! Nurse Kimberly! After all these years, she’d found me. And I was dating her. And she was a man named Jimmy.
“You need to…,” I continued stammering as I stuffed my mouth full of quiche, “mcfuhcghmsflmp.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, “I’ll be sure to do that.”
There was nothing else to say—I had been having more than my fair share of low blood sugar attacks lately. Trying to control your diabetes when you’re not checking your glucose levels and when you’re not visiting a doctor and when you’re just blindly dosing out your insulin on a wing and a prayer is…a challenge.
“But every time I check my blood sugar it costs a dollar!” I lamented.
“Work it out,” Jimmy said. “Just work it out.”
Ouch.
“Besides, you’ve got lots of dollars, you wait tables.”
Well, lots of dollars, phsh. I didn’t have those; he was exaggerating. I was, as my dear friend Claire the bartender once put it, “the worst waiter in the world.” Still, I did make some dollars, and surely some of them could be put toward making sure I didn’t constantly almost slip into a coma at night. So I commandeered Jimmy’s empty piggy bank and started depositing into it any extraneous bills and coins I’d managed to accumulate on a given day. Once a month I started visiting the pharmacy and grudgingly plunking down all my barely earned cash to pay for some test strips to go with my insulin. The first month I brought them home, tossed the pharmacy bag on the couch, and asked Jimmy accusingly, “Are you happy now?”
“Uh-huh,” he said before asking me if I was planning on replacing the piggy bank I’d broken because I couldn’t manage to remove the rubber stopper on the bottom and ended up shattering the poor pig on the floor because Give me my money, pig!
I slumped down on the couch, and tested my blood sugar for what seemed like the first time in years. Jimmy leaned over to witness the verdict: 130.
“Wow, it’s totally normal,” I said. “I could have saved that dollar.”
Jimmy looked at me with his serious face. “Yeah, well, one of these days you’ll check it and it’ll be, like, forty or something and you’ll save yourself and me a shit-ton of trouble by going ahead to the cabinet and getting a damn cookie.”
I couldn’t really disagree with his logic. I put away my glucometer.
“We should go to the Asian market,” he said. “Get another pig.”
I checked my wallet. “I don’t got a lot of dollars.”
“I’ll split it with you,” Jimmy said.
“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re doing it we should get one that’s sparkly and has Japanese letters on the side. Do it up right.”
“Agreed.”
We both stood and headed to the door.
“Oh,” I said, “you know what else, we might as well go by Bojangles and get some Cajun chicken biscuits.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Jimmy nodded, opening the door. “And some unsweet tea. Don’t forget your insulin.”
Me again. Yeah, it’s four o’clock in the morning, and the chivalrous James is busy chasing our batty hero around the apartment trying to get him to eat ice cream. It’s a real hoot.
The diabetic wunderkind has just run into the living room and is “hiding” in the corner. The thing is, though, it’s not really hiding if you’re just crouched in the corner with your eyes scrunched shut next to the big potted plant. You can still be seen! This is called object permanence, and it’s something humans learn when they are quite young. But apparently diabetics forget about it when their blood sugar is, say, twenty-one.
Of course, our boy has always been seriously grumpy when he’s in this particular situation. His love of piles of sugary sweet treats being offered to him during normal waking hours notwithstanding, for some mysterious reason he doesn’t like being bullied into downing ice cream or Nutella or whatever when he’s about to pass out from sugarlessness. “Leave me be!” he insists. “Allow me to convulse violently and then slip into a coma in peace!”
Somehow or other James finds him in his secret hiding place there in the corner next to the plant in the fully lit living room and forces delicious, fatty ice cream into his mouth while berating him thusly:
“Eat it!” he demands
. “Eat this shit! You need to eat it! Put it in your mouth! That’s right, put it in your mouth! Open your mouth, you asshole! Goddamn it, when you come to, I’m going to fucking smack the shit out of you!”
Wow—didn’t know James had it in him. Rowr. Work it out, girl. Work it out.
Our hero relents and allows the cookies ’n’ cream into his drooling mouth. He slowly gets his groove on and starts to enjoy the taste, swiping the container away from James and stumbling over to the couch to sit down, because even in the state he’s in he knows full well that you have to be sitting down to fully enjoy dessert.
“M’sorry,” he says.
“Great!” James snaps. “So, guess how you’re making it up to me?”
The boy answers by wiping ice cream from his face with a couch pillow and looking wanly at James.
“We’re going to your doctor! Yes! Get on that phone in the morning! Can’t wait to meet him!”
Our hero scrapes the bottom of the container with the spoon.
“We got any more?”
Jimmy and I sat in the examination room waiting for Dr. Cook to return with a sample of a brand-new type of insulin that I would be switching to.
“Is this a good thing, do you think?” Jimmy asked.
“Sounds like it. If it’s a shorter-acting insulin that means I can take it just minutes before I eat, and then it leaves my body quicker. So there’s not an excess amount of insulin in my system constantly.”
Jimmy’s expression conveyed great confusion. He appeared to be trying to solve for x without being able to write anything down.
“Basically, it means fewer insulin reactions in the middle of the night,” I clarified.
“Oh, good.”
Dr. Cook walked back into the room with a small rectangular box, which held the new device, called an “insulin pen,” that I would be using to inject myself. That’s right: The days of syringes were over, at least until I decided to become a junkie. Dr. Cook pulled it out, and I got a look: The pen was about the size of a Magic Marker. Into it I would insert a 300-milliliter cartridge of Humalog insulin, twist the knob on the bottom to the desired dosage, and then just plunge the pen into my flesh like normal and, a few minutes later, I could be happily eating some of Jimmy’s quiche or whatever.
After Dr. Cook had given me my little Humalog pen tutorial, we turned to another topic closer to Jimmy’s heart.
“So you’ve been having lots of low blood sugars at night?”
“Yeah, way too often,” Jimmy said. “And always between three and four o’clock.”
“Well, this Humalog will definitely be of some help with that,” Dr. Cook assured us, “though you’ve really got to make sure you’re testing right before bed—ideally twice before bed, about two hours apart, so you can see if it’s headed in a particular direction. Obviously I’m limited in the advice I can give you because you didn’t write down your levels in your sugar diary for me.” A little guilt-tripping was par for the course by now with Dr. Cook.
“OK,” Jimmy said, looking at me sternly, “he’ll do that.”
“So, Jimmy,” Dr. Cook began, standing up and going over to the small fridge in the corner, “it’s time for your initiation into the wonderful world of glucagon.”
The dreaded glucagon—the hormone secreted by the pancreas to fight low blood sugar levels, basically acting as the anti-insulin. It came in individually wrapped, prefilled syringes with big fat needles and could be used in emergencies to stabilize a low level. I was introduced to it upon my diagnosis in Baltimore, when the nurses explained to Mom how to administer it during extreme low blood sugars before placing it in my mom’s fearful hand. Once we got home to Raleigh, the glucagon never moved from the fridge because neither Mom nor Dad could bring themselves to use it when I was flailing about like a rag doll in a blender. When the glucagon expired, it was thrown out, and we never thought about it again, satisfied to rely on orange juice, cake icing, and the grace of God.
But Jimmy had somehow found out about the existence of glucagon—though God knows how because the Internet was still in its GeoCities phase—and he wanted to learn how to use it for/against me.
Dr. Cook directed me to sit on the examination table, and as I slid onto it and got uncomfortable, he filled an empty glucagon syringe with a saline solution so that Jimmy could not only practice stabbing me with it but could also practice pushing the liquid in. Sure, I’d been giving myself shots for years now, and I never even thought twice about pulling out a syringe and jabbing myself any old time, whether I was perched on the couch, sitting at a restaurant, or driving. But, again, this was a big. Fat. Needle. Much fatter than my sleek, slender syringes. And it was going to be plunged into me by a rank amateur.
“OK, you ready?” Dr. Cook asked Jimmy. Jimmy looked more scared than I was. He himself had never given me a shot, not even for kicks, and it appeared now that he was getting cold feet.
Dr. Cook lifted up my short sleeve and wiped an alcohol swab over a patch of my upper arm, getting it ready to receive.
“Now, squeeze the flesh with your fingers like this”—Dr. Cook grabbed a chunk of my tricep and held it tightly—“and just go for it.”
Jimmy did as he was told. He took the patch of arm between his fingers and thumb and, in typical Jimmy fashion, squeezed it extremely weakly.
“Jimmy, you can grab it harder than that,” I said. “I don’t want you to hit bone.”
Jimmy sighed and gripped the skin harder. He then plunged the big fat needle into my arm, and I quietly received it, biting my lip and closing my eyes. Then he pushed in the medicine, and I screamed.
The pain was real and sustained. I squirmed and struggled to stay still on the examination table as Jimmy slowly pushed the solution in, trying to hold the needle steady and looking like he was on the verge of panicking and accidentally breaking it off inside my arm. It took ten long years for him to finish. When those ten years were finally over, he pulled out the needle, and I gasped, eyes bulging. I looked up at the doctor, and he was smiling playfully.
“Oh my God, that hurt like hell!” I said, breathing heavily. “Did you know it was going to hurt like that?”
“Oh, no,” Dr. Cook said unconvincingly. “But you’re tough; look at you. You can take it.”
The doctor had a point: I was tough. Like a male gymnast or a ballroom dancer. And though I was still reeling from the assault, why not just let the doctor’s empty flattery work on me? I looked at Jimmy, who had the appearance of someone who’d just seen a ghost and stabbed it with a big fat syringe.
“Jimmy, you OK?” I asked.
He stood there with the needle still in his hand, looking at it as if it were a murder weapon.
“Jimmy, you can put it down now.”
He placed it on the counter and wiped his brow.
“Jimmy, come on, I’m fine! I mean, it hurt, but I’m fine.”
As we walked out to the car, Jimmy was silent.
“You OK?” I asked as I unlocked his door.
“I just…,” he mumbled. “Didn’t enjoy that nearly as much I wanted to.”
It was the nicest thing he’d said to me in weeks. My heart melted. As he slumped into his car seat, looking like a wounded animal, it hit me: That injection he gave me hurt him. My stupid diabetes and I had been regularly irritating the hell out of him for months, but now we’d really done it—we’d hurt him. How dare we?!
“I’m really sorry, Jimmy,” I said. “We should have started small—like, you know, with the finger pricker.”
Jimmy nodded and then shuddered.
“We should do that tonight—sit down and teach you how to get a blood sample for checking my sugar. OK?”
Jimmy was silent for a moment. “Yeah. Guess I should learn.”
“Then once you’re comfortable with that we can graduate to injections. It’ll be fun.”
Jimmy nodded, then shuddered again.
“Have you ever astral projected yourself?”
I looked a
t Jimmy’s friend Nicole, confused, wondering if I’d heard her correctly. It was a few months later, and we were at the apartment, where a party for my twenty-sixth birthday was in full swing. Prince was on the stereo, and folks were yammering a bunch of nonsense.
“Have I ever what?”
“Astral projected yourself?”
“Oh, definitely not,” I said, trying to give the most honest answer I could. “Well, not on purpose.” Didn’t even know what it was.
“Really? Oh, wow, you should really try it, it’s eye-opening.”
“But,” I said, picking up our malnourished new cat, Finley, and plonking her on the couch, “how do you do it?”
“Oh, well, first you’ve got to let go of your fear,” she said, as if that’s even possible. “Then you have to go into your room, and lie on your bed, because you have to relax, both physically and mentally.”
“What if one of your fears is silence?” I wondered aloud, looking over at grumpy, gray little Finley. She was a stray who’d shown up at our apartment building the previous month looking desperately underfed. After a few weeks of seeing her roam around the gravel parking lot by the fire escape stairs looking more haggard and forlorn every day, we finally relented and brought her inside, much to the chagrin of Stella, whose first reaction was to corner me in the bathroom and say, “Who that bitch?” Within a week we realized that Finley, in addition to being malnourished, balding, and misshapen, was also pregnant.
“Oh, you can do it,” Nicole assured me. “Trust me, you can. I’m a basket case, and I can do it.”
Finley jumped off the couch and walked out of the living room.
“Tim, let’s go ahead and cut that damn cake,” Mandy said, stumbling up to me and holding a glass of wine. “I wanna eat it.”
“Yeah, I wanna put it in my mouth,” Dani said, sidling up beside her.
“OK,” I said, “but hold on a sec, I have to be a good diabetic first.” I went and got my diabetes case, pulled out the glucometer—a new one that only took a minute to give results rather than two—and sat back down.
