Doubled or Nothing

by Warren Esby

  Chapter 5

  I kept looking for black Buick Regals all the way to Chicago. I actually saw two of them in rest stops along the way and they both had Illinois license plates on them, but none of them followed me. Both cars were empty and no one looking anything like the drivers of the day before was visible at any of the rest areas. And although they both had Illinois plates, neither had the number from the car being driven by the bald man. Since I had time to waste that day, I actually sat in my car for an hour at the second rest area that I saw the Buick, pretending to take a nap. Many cars came and went during that time, but the Buick never moved. Oh well. Maybe it was just a dream, I thought to myself. Sure it was. I later found out that Olga had put a tracking device on my car the day before at the last rest area before I got to Tommy’s. Stupid me. I had not thought to look for one, and they were able to follow me half way to San Diego before it fell off. I told you I can be pretty stupid at times for someone with a Ph.D. from MIT.

  I was going to stay with another fraternity brother of mine in Chicago. His name was Peter Porkerton. He was about 5’5” tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, but it wasn’t fat although it looked like it was. It was all muscle. And he was as mean as a snake and had a very short temper. He looked about as wide as he did tall, and he had a small head with very close cropped hair, small porcine eyes and a short nose with very prominent nostrils that looked like a pig’s snout. But no one called him Peter. Everyone called him by a nickname that was really the only nickname you could call him by. You guessed it. We all called him Peetie. Well, Peetie had become pretty successful during the four years since we graduated college and I had been pursuing my Ph.D. Peetie had become a pastry chef and a damn good one. It was funny though. He refused to eat what he made. He said if he did he was afraid he would get fat and if there was anything that Peetie Porkerton didn’t want was for someone to think he looked fat. Since I got into Chicago late in the afternoon, I went directly to his main bistro and pastry shop called Chez de Porc. He had named it that because Chez Pierre was too commonplace. He told me it was a play on his last name. “Did I get it?” he asked. I told him I got it. He was happy to see me, even if I still had some dog hair on my pants that I hadn’t been able to brush off. I had changed my shirt at the first rest area.

  Peetie had been real successful. He was a super pastry chef and had rapidly opened two additional bistros after the success of his first, and he told me he was thinking of starting a business to bake and ship his creations all over the U.S. He had even thought of the name he wanted to call it. He explained that most people knew about Sara Lee. He was going to call his company Peetie Pee. I told him that sounded great. Then he proudly made me taste everything he had made that day that hadn’t been sold out. He wanted to taste them all as he often did as a quality control. He brought over about a half dozen different pastries and took a miniscule bite out of each one. He made me eat the rest. Now I might have satisfied Peetie by eating most of the rest, but my mother had always told me it was my duty to eat everything on my plate. I had to renew my membership in ‘the clean plate club’ every day. It was because of all the starving children in China or Africa or wherever. I didn’t understand how my eating everything was helping all those starving children over there, but I knew I had to eat it when my father gave me one of those looks of his. Anyway, I did end up eating most of the six pieces of pastry while complimenting Peetie on every one no matter how sick and nauseous I was becoming. At first it was okay because they were delicious and I almost never could afford anything sweet let alone good pastry. At the end, I had to excuse myself to pee and went into the rest room and threw up. I just made it in time.

  When I came back out it was time for Peetie to leave and go home for the day. He lived on Lake Shore Drive in a really nice condo with a door man and all. I followed him and parked my car in the guest parking area. I was suffering from a sugar high and had a headache. We went upstairs into his apartment and I looked around. It was elegantly furnished with dainty little figurines and art work all over the place. Most of the furniture looked like it would break if Peetie actually sat on it. The only things that did not look like they belonged were the pictures of Peetie winning his various wrestling matches in college and looking all mean and sweaty as he did so. I noticed some animal figurines on a little glass table with a many colored glass lamp on it. Now knowing something about china and foolishly trying to impress him with my recent knowledge, I asked if they were Beswick or Lladro. He looked at me with scorn and said,

  “Don’t insult me. That stuff is crap. These are genuine antique Meissen figurines. And that’s a Chihuly Lamp on the table with them.”

  “Sorry. I should have known. They are exquisite,” I said as I began to feel stupid again.

  Well, Peetie was a good host. He offered me a drink. I turned down the margarita, which the thought of made my stomach churn although I usually liked them, and finally settled on a glass of scotch. Unlike Tommy’s, Peetie’s condo was immaculate and had a spectacular view of the lake. We reminisced about old times and the things we had done and the girls we had dated. We had done many things together, all without Tommy. We did go out to eat after I threw up one more time, and he took me to a really good steak house. Needless to say, I declined dessert. We went back to his house and the cab left us off in front. I was immediately blown off my feet. Have you ever been on Lake Shore Drive when there is a strong wind off Lake Michigan? I am fairly light and I practically couldn’t stand up and walk. I had to hold on to a lamp post and move towards the front door in between gusts. At first I thought Peetie had pushed me down, but he was halfway to the front door. Having such a low center of gravity, he seemed to be impervious to the wind. Battling the wind, I finally made it to the front door where Peetie was waiting patiently, swaying and weaving against the wind the whole way. When I got there he said,

  “Boy. You really can’t hold your booze like you used to, can you? You’ve getting soft, probably because you eat too many sweets. I watched you gobble those pastries down in my bistro. You really shouldn’t eat so much sugar. It’s not good for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll try to remember that.”

  Chapter 6

  Early the next morning, after a breakfast of coffee and pastry (my stomach held it down), I said goodbye to Peetie, who was going downstairs to the gym to work off all the excess sugar he had eaten the day before. I got into my car, kissed the steering wheel and I was on my way west again. I had run out of ex-fraternity brothers to mooch off of or anyone else to mooch off of for that matter. I didn’t know anyone west of the Mississippi whether in a fraternity or not. I had always been an east coast person and had never even been west of New York before. I had never had the need to do so. I had to plan my trip differently now. I had planned to camp out each night and had to decide how far I was going and approximately where I would be stopping. I decided to go at least as far as Omaha and hopefully a bit beyond before I would have to stop and camp. By camping I mean laying my sleeping bag on the ground and going to sleep. When I woke up, I planned to wash up at some rest area bathroom and brush my teeth and take a shave. I had heard that some truck stops also offered showers. I had taken a shower at Peetie’s and washed my clothes the night before. He almost hadn’t let me do so because of all the dog hair.

  The reason I wanted to go beyond Omaha was because I definitely decided I didn’t want to have to camp in Iowa. I had heard that Iowa was nothing but cornfields, endless miles of cornfields, and that turned out to be true. The reason I didn’t want to camp in Iowa was because I didn’t want to camp in the middle of a cornfield. You always hear about crows flying above corn fields and eating the corn if there wasn’t a scarecrow there. I didn’t want to camp someplace where a lot of black birds were flying around and pooping on everything like all the pigeons do back east. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning with crow poop all over me. That was worse than dog hair. And I couldn’t be sure of finding a cornfie
ld with a scarecrow in it. I did have the thought that maybe crows didn’t like to fly around at night, and then I remembered that the black bird that flew around at night was called a raven, not a crow. Maybe it’s the same bird but they call it by a different name when it’s flying at night. Well I didn’t want to wake up covered with raven poop either. At least if I went beyond Omaha, I would be in Nebraska and I had heard there were lots of cow pastures in Nebraska. That was a better situation. Although the pastures would have cow excrement in them, I think they call them cow pies, at least the cow pies wouldn’t be falling from the sky. All you had to do was avoid them if you wanted to put your sleeping bag down. As I thought of all of this, I tried hard not to think of the juxtaposition of all the stuff I had seen and eaten the day before that had been given the name pie alongside of the image of what a cow pie might look like. I mean, did it have a certain kind of crust and was that why it was called a pie? I avoided thinking about it anymore that day, but I did still intend to sleep in a cow pasture that night rather than a cornfield.

  The trip was rather uneventful that day. I only saw one black Buick Regal the whole day that I was sure of, although I did see several black cars either way ahead of me or way behind me on the interstate. The one I did see was just pulling out of the last rest area before Omaha as I was pulling in. It did have a bald man driving it, but when I looked at the license plate to check if it was the right number, it turned out to have a Colorado license plate. When I looked up as it sped away, I could see part of the driver’s face in the rear view mirror. It looked like he may have had a mustache.

  As I drove along, I started to think of my future and what had brought me to this point in my career. My Ph.D. was in biology although I had been an engineering student as an undergraduate. The reason I switched was because I decided that if I became an engineer I would kill myself within the first year from depression. Chemical engineering has endless tables that you have to consult and endless formulas you have to use and endless calculations you have to make. You just sit there looking at books filled with numbers and charts and do calculations. It involves a lot of math. Not that I’m bad at math or anything. I wouldn’t have been admitted to MIT if I had been bad at math. But I don’t live and breathe to do math calculations all day. You may ask why it involves so much math if it is supposed to be chemical engineering with chemical being the first word. You would think there was a lot of chemistry involved and I did like chemistry in high school, which is why I decided to major in chemical engineering – also because I heard that there was always a demand for engineers and they made good money. Well, I never did find out why chemical engineering had so little chemistry in it and so much math.

  I could lie to you and say that I went into biology, and more specifically medical research, because I wanted to help people by pushing back the frontiers of science and developing new cures for disease and all that, but that wouldn’t be truthful. Lies never are. Truthful that is. Although the work I did may end up helping cure disease someday, the real reason I went into biology was for other reasons and because of a summer job I had during the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. I lived in a suburb of Boston called Waltham that had a University called Brandeis that was supposed to be Jewish oriented or something because Brandeis had been Jewish, you know the old Supreme Court Justice who it was named after. I really looked forward to mingling with people whose ethnic background I didn’t know that much about so I would not only have an interesting job but I would become familiar with a different culture than my own. And I do have fond memories of that summer because of the diversity I encountered. Virtually all the people I worked with and the Professor I worked for were, as I’m sure you would suspect, Japanese. And I did get exposed to a lot of ethnic food such as sushi and eel and seminal vesicles as well as chopped herring and chopped liver and smoked whitefish salad and lox, the latter being typical Jewish culinary delights along with pizza and Chinese food.

  I was really impressed with the lab I was to work in. I remember my first day as I was waiting for the professor to arrive and staring at some of the equipment there and wondering what miracle cures were being made by them. There was this big vat of fluid that was bubbling over a Bunsen burner and the mixture of fluid and vapor escaping went through a whole series of coils and into a big enclosed chamber that you couldn’t see into and then out the other end. Finally, this very blackish brown liquid dripped out the other side of the enclosed chamber and into another large open vat that was also cooking but over a much lower flame on its Bunsen burner. This vat had a little spigot on it where you could release some of the fluid into a beaker underneath. The whole thing reminded me of one of those movies where the wizard was in a laboratory with all sorts of concoctions of different colors bubbling away. This particular elaborate piece of equipment took up one half of one side of the laboratory bench so I knew it was important. I couldn’t wait for the professor to come in so I could ask him what it was for. I never did. When he came in, he said,

  “Hello. Please wait a minute.”

  He then went over to the sink and took a mug hanging on a rack there, rinsed it out and then came over to the apparatus, opened the spigot in the large vat of blackish brown fluid and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “I can’t really talk to anyone before I’ve had my morning coffee,” said Professor Osaka.

  And then he offered me some. I accepted and he went over and took a random mug that had been used by who knows who before, rinsed it out perfunctorily and handed it to me. The inside I noticed was all stained with coffee in little rings around it, and it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned properly since it was bought. I was worried about getting germs, but I couldn’t really say anything, could I? I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a sip. After about the third sip, my eyes opened wide and I was suddenly sitting quite upright and my head was swimming. I felt like I had just had a shot of adrenaline. Actually I don’t know what a shot of adrenaline feels like, but I’m sure what I felt must be similar. It was the strongest coffee I had ever tasted up until that point, and I haven’t tasted any that strong since I left Brandeis. I immediately knew why no one was concerned about how clean the coffee cups were. Nothing could live in that brown fluid, I was sure. I did get used to the coffee and even learned to like it. Even though Starbucks tastes tame in comparison, I’ve been a coffee drinker ever since that summer.

  That coffee apparatus was my introduction to laboratory work sponsored by government grants. Dr. Osaka then gave me my assignment for the summer. He told me that the research they were doing had to have a constant supply of rat serum from rats whose livers were being regenerated and they needed the liver cells as well. Don’t ask me why because I never found out. I guess I was on a need to know basis and I didn’t have to know very much, only how to cut open a rat, take out most of its liver, suture off the remainder, sew the rat back up and after the rat’s liver regenerated, cut it open again, take out all its liver that had somehow grown back to its original size, collect all its serum and dispose of the evidence. I did leave out a few steps where I anesthetized the rat before operating on it and humanely putting it to sleep afterwards, although there were a few mishaps that weren’t too humane both for the rat and for me. Now I can’t tell you how the professor always seemed to know that the rat had regenerated its liver, but he did. He was, as they say, inscrutable.

  I quickly became very proficient at my job and had a high degree of success with the percent of rats that survived the operation and went on to regenerate their livers. Although only 85% survived the operation, 100% of those regenerated their livers and all 100 % were killed after they did. Now those are good statistics in anyone’s book. As I said, I became good at operating on rats. First I had to anesthetize them. Actually, first I had to pick them up and put them in a chamber of ether fumes. And that was the most dangerous part of the whole operation where rats could get hurt and fingers could get bitten. The rats that they used were all from the
same strain of laboratory rat. They looked like ordinary white laboratory rats. They had white fur and red eyes and long ugly tails. But these were no ordinary rats. This particular strain was truly vicious so I had to be careful. They had a very special skill and were very cunning in attacking their prey, my fingers. The way I would pick them up was by their tail. You would think that was very safe with the rat hanging down at the bottom of a long tail. I was supposed to just pick them up, pop them into the ether jar and close the lid. That’s where this strain’s special skill came in. They were born with the skill to quickly climb up their own tail and bite whatever was holding on to their tail. When that happened, they invariably got dropped on the floor and had to be retrieved. It wasn’t that difficult to catch them. They didn’t have that many places to go. Sometimes I thought they wanted to be picked up again because they thought it was a game. The game was called, go up in the air and bite a finger.

  The reason I had such a high success rate was I really was very careful about what I did. It really frustrated me when, after operating on a rat, it would die before regenerating its liver, especially if I had been bitten by it in the process. What caused them to die most of the time was too much ether during the operation. Once they were anesthetized and in the operating area, I would put a little cone filled with cotton soaked in ether over their nose. It was called a nose cone and it was similar in shape to the nose cone on a missile and, on occasion, would serve the same function. I had to adjust how much of the nose cone was over the rat’s nose. Too little and the rat would start to wake up. Too much and it was likely to die. I usually was pretty good at adjusting the nose cone but occasionally, especially in the beginning, I lost several rats. That’s when the nose cone became, in fact, a missile nose cone as, out of frustration, that rat with nose cone attached was sent like a missile across the room, nose cone first.