by ed. Pela Via
Later on Lassiter’s uncle took us out in his punt-boat. He had an old crank telephone hooked to a bank of car batteries. He dangled the wires into the water and cranked the phone. “Dialing for fish,” he called it. Jagged veins of stark white ripped into the black water; electricity crackled the boat’s hull with Rice Krispie pops. Fish floated up, twitching. The voltage had burst their eyes. Lassiter’s uncle whooped, scooping them up in a net.
Sometimes you learn a new way that’s more effective, sure, but you forfeit some crucial element in the process—or maybe the process itself is the element?
The radio crackled.
. . . intersection of Third and Duggan . . . possible gunshot wound . . .
I hit the siren and stood on the gas pedal. We charged up Rainbow Road, zagging between motorists.
“GSW?” said Lassiter. “Too early for that.”
Guns are late night score settlers. And knives. Occasionally hatchets. Every so often, hammers. Once, and only once, a rack of antlers off an eight-point elk.
We were first on scene. A late model Mercedes Benz was bumped up over the curb. Three college-age guys were staggering around, dazed. One had a pretty nice gash on his head. A fourth guy was on the ground.
Lassiter reached over and cupped my head in his large hands. Pulling it forward, he planted a kiss on my forehead. Ether could bring out the touchy-feely in him.
“Let’s do some good,” he said.
He stumbled out the passenger door. I went round back and popped the bay doors. I grabbed the Ambu-Care Kit, a few air casts, and a neck splint.
“You little fucking MORONS!”
I double-timed it round the ambulance. In the wash of rotating red lights I saw Lassiter, beet-faced, bellowing at the injured boy on the ground.
“You dumbshit fuck!”
Here’s the thing you’ll realize: as a species, we are on a termination vector. You see so many mean and petty and horrifically stupid things, that conclusion is unavoidable. It becomes difficult to maintain a professional veneer. Doubly so when you’re gassed to the tits on ether.
As a for-instance: one time we responded to a call in the upscale Fort Schlosser neighborhood. A bungalow encircled by meticulously-trimmed box hedges. The guy who answered Lassiter’s knock was clean-shaven, with an artsy look.
“It’s my boyfriend,” he told us.
He led us into a wide room dominated by a white calfskin sofa and loveseat. His boyfriend stood awkwardly, with a tight smile on his face.
“Thank you for coming.”
“That’s our job,” Lassiter told him. “Although by the look of it you could have made it into Emerg, yeah?”
The guy dropped his eyes. His body went rigid as a tremor passed through him.
“Tell them,” the artsy guy said.
“You tell them. It was your idea.”
“Okay, then—”
“It was a stupid . . .” the other guy cut in. “I have . . . there is . . . oh, for God’s sake . . .”
He stared at the ceiling. At us, defiantly. “There’s an electric toothbrush up my ass.”
You’d be surprised how often paramedics respond to trauma of this rather specific nature. Not always electric toothbrushes, but implements of a similar physical disposition. What most people don’t know is, our intestines have a kink just past the retroventrical pouch. It is even more pronounced once a man reaches early middle age, when the intestinal wall forfeits its youthful tension. When a foreign object is forcefully introduced, the sphincter muscles tighten reflexively and force said object into the aforementioned kink, where it can become lodged.
Paramedics colloquially refer to this kink as the ‘shameful pocket,’ owing to the fact that a great many dark secrets find their way into it.
“What model of toothbrush?” Lassiter asked.
“Does that really matter?” the guy asked.
“Not too much,” Lassiter admitted. “The real question is: sir, do you happen to have teeth in your large intestine? If so, I daresay that’s something Ripley’s Believe It Or Not ought to be made aware of.”
Of all the bizarre traumas you tend to see, an electric toothbrush up the keister actually sat on the tame side of the ledger. Lassiter drove them to Emerg. I sat in the back. They held hands—which, honestly, was nice to see. The electric toothbrush hadn’t quite run out of juice. The guy whose ass it inhabited trembled fitfully whenever it snapped to life in his lower colon. The whites of his eyes quivered.
“Feeling all right?” I asked.
“Y-y-you h-h-have nuh-nuh-no ih-ih-idea,” he said with quiet rapture.
I relate this because that’s not always the way it goes. Sometimes people in the same predicament resort to some hack medical procedure—going after it with barbecue tongs or whatever—and create an anal fissure, a fistula, or even perforate the intestinal wall. They’ll simply lie in bed and bleed to death. All because they can’t bring themselves to dial those three digits.
As a paramedic, the one thing you want to tell those people is that ultimately, nothing is more shameful than dying of shame. But I understand that shame, part of which arises at the prospect of having to explain one’s condition to the first line of response. The fear we’ll show up and say:
“You had to try it, didn’t you? Stick a fucking toothbrush up your fanny. Did you satisfy your curiosity, bozo?”
Me, I tend to be diplomatic, if not entirely compassionate. Lassiter . . .
“You dumbshit fuck!” he presently screamed at the kid laid out on the tarmac. I pieced it together. Four guys joyriding around in one of their father’s Benzes, firing cat’s eye marbles at bus shelters. The car hit a bump; the gun barrel dipped and a marble ricocheted off the window frame back into the interior.
“Move your hands, fuckhead!” Lassiter said to the kid. “Let me see what I’m working with here.”
When Lassiter saw, he straightened up and made a defeated clucking sound. He ran his hands through his lank hair, cast me a beleaguered glance and said:
“You deal with it. I’m too fucked up.”
I knelt beside the injured boy. He had one of those large, ever-weeping zits where his nostril met his cheek—the type some guys spend their entire senior years nursing. His left orbital socket was cracked clean where the zigomatic arch met the maxillary bone. One half of his cheek was shoved above the other, overlapping like patio flagstones after the ground has settled.
His eye was avulsed: this is where the eyeball has been partially ejected from the ocular vault. Some paramedics call it a ‘jacket potato’ injury. If you’ve ever squeezed a grape from its skin, you likely get the picture.
“You’ll be fine,” I told the boy, who was shivering like a dog in the rain. “Can you see?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Anything? Colors? Even grey?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like, a broken rainbow.”
“That’s good. That means your retinal nerve is still attached. That’s very good. Now you need to stay still while I prep you, okay?”
“Is my dad’s car fucked?”
“It’s fine.”
“He’d kill me.”
Lassiter was busy tearing a strip off the other three.
“You twisted fuckfaces!” He stalked round the Benz like a grizzly marking territory. Every so often he lunged at one of them, making them flinch. “Don’t you have . . . have . . . hobbies?”
He lunged, then danced nimbly back, hooting.
“I got moves like Baryshnikov, baby! But this is pure pussy-ass, boys. Driving round in a fine aut-to-mo-bile shooting what? Shooting marbles? With a paintball gun?”
The Benz’s motor was still running. Jarring notes poured out of the speakers. “Is that—?” Lassiter fumed.
“Is that Godsmack? Oh, you should all be shot.” He reached through the rear window to retrieve the paintball gun. The glassy rattle of marbles in its plastic hopper. With the C02 canister resting casually on his hip, he pulled the trigger. A
marble punched through the windshield.
“Okay,” he said. “I can see the appeal.”
“What was that?” the kid said. I rubbed zeolite moisture salve onto a strip of breathable gauze and taped it over his eye.
“Nothing,” I said, and taped another strip of gauze over his working eye.
Lassiter had the boy sit on the Benz’s hood while he dressed the head gash with Titebond: a non-allergenic medical contact cement used to glue split flesh together in lieu of sutures. Problem being: Lassiter was all ethered up. He’d glued the kid’s wound together, yeah, but the result was . . . Dali-esque. He gawped at his fingers, all hopelessly glued together, then doubled over laughing.
I said, “Get the gurney, Lassy, would you?”
“I got to go to the hospital?” said the boy.
“You figure you can walk around with your eyeball hanging halfway out of your skull? You must be quite confident in your recuperative powers.”
“Who’s going to drive the car home?”
“You trust any of them?”
“No,” he said flatly.
“Call your father?”
“No.”
“Mom?”
“She doesn’t live with us anymore.”
Lassiter shoved the gurney out of the ambulance. It rolled merrily away. He chased it down, kicked it around, and pushed it back—butting it directly into my spine.
“Jesus, man!”
“Sorry. Let’s get Mister One-Eyed Jack loaded up.”
“Come on, Lassy. Simmer down.”
“Pity not the fools,” he told me, and in this his voice was hard.
A second ambulance pulled up. Stubbs and Randalman got out. Stubbs puffed his chest out and strode round the scene, nitpicking with shiny ratlike eyes.
“Who the fuck Titebonded that one?” he said, indicating the kid with the glued-together face. “Looking like a plastic surgery nightmare.”
“That be me,” said Lassiter. He adopted an affected 70’s-era pimp-strut, juking his shoulders and cupping his hands like steamshovel buckets—a crude but cutting imitation of Stubbs’s swagger. “You got a problem, slick?”
Next they were chesting up. Stubbs took a nasty little swing and clipped Lassiter’s chin. Lassiter stepped back feigning wooziness, howling with mirth. Randalman and I stepped between. Lassiter smiled, bobbing on the tips of his toes with his hands raised in the old-timey boxer’s stance.
“Put your dukes up,” he simpered. “Show me what you got, show me how it huuurts . . .”
I’ll love Lassiter to the grave and had his back above all others, but here I had to side with Stubbs. After all, Lassiter was sleeping at the man’s house and fucking his ex-wife.
We got the boy to the ER. The admitting doctor was a burnout case with eyes like blown fuses. He peeled the bandage off the boy’s wound. Next he raked his hands down his face with sufficient force to reveal the pebbled red of his eyelids.
“I just . . .” his voice trailed off. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, you better figure it out,” I told him.
“This boy needs an exorcist,” he said.
“Are you high?”
“Listen,” he said with real heat. “I’m on zero hour.”
Zero hour is the final hour of an ER doctor’s shift. Statistics show that over eighty percent of malpractice suits filed against ERs involve a doctor on zero hour.
“Can I do anything?”
“Can you get an eye back into a socket?” he asked, with the serious expectation that perhaps I could.
“No.”
“But there’s nothing to it.”
“I suspect there is.”
The doctor put a hand on my shoulder. His fingers pulsed like a sea anemone.
“You don’t have the bottle. That’s okay. They don’t pay you to have the bottle, do they? Anyway, all of that was settled a long time ago.”
With the adrenaline burnt off, I needed a swallow. I thumbed the combo on my locker and found the fifth of Rumpleminze. Three hard hits, the deep bob of my Adam’s apple. The beauty of Rumpleminze: it’s pepperminty, so you just tell everybody you’d brushed your teeth.
I leaned inside the locker, skull on the cold metal as the booze napalmed in my gut and spread in glittering wings. Every part of me that was shaking, stopped.
Back in the ambulance Lassiter was gonzo. I’m talking, nil by mouth.
“My horse is dying,” he told me, eyes squeezed shut.
“Check that . . . she’s dead.”
His breath smelled faintly of piss and I could guess the pills he’d been chewing.
The floor between his shoes sparkled with busted ether ampules.
“I need to see Gail,” he said. “Take me home.”
I drove him. First of all, because he was useless to me in this state. Secondly, because I just about always did what he said. We’d drifted apart in high school. He went the way of the football team and cheerleaders with legs smooth as blue cobalt, towards some future indefinable but for its assured glory. I went the way of the smoke hole skids, riding in the back seat of Ford Topazes with my lungs hardening to pig leather. Then one day he saw me at a pep rally and must have said: I remember liking him. He pulled me back into his orbit and I was grateful. To this day, am. Those sorts of casual kindnesses dig a home down deep. And now he’s falling apart. We both are, but him so much faster. I’m a drunk, sure, but a manageable one. I forecasted thirty, forty years of functional alcoholism—a therapeutic administration, like insulin—where I held down a job, maybe owned a dog. Now Lassiter was screwing with that. And I didn’t quite know what to do. I pulled into Stubbs’s driveway. The poor bastard presently hung his hat at the Passport Inn. Lassiter’s fingers were still glued together. I found a tube of xylene gel, squeezed a dab into his palms. I rubbed it over his fingertips to loosen the glue. His eyelids fluttered open.
“Jesus,” he said. “Your nose.”
He cupped my face with one hand. The reek of industrial solvent. “You get hit or something? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sometimes I think this was why he’d taken to huffing ether: it put him back into contact with his humanity. He picked up the silver brick of meatloaf and swayed up the porch. Knocking on the front door like a visitor, not the owner.
Gail answered in a diaphanous robe.
Gail . . . Gail was immense. Voluptuous wasn’t even ballparking it. Every time I saw her, one word sprang to mind: hypertrophic. A medical term to describe body parts that escape the bounds of normal human scale. Arm wrestlers have hypertrophic biceps. Gail was hypertrophic in manners pleasing to the male gaze. Huge, pale, vein-riven breasts. Hips that flared alarmingly from a waspish waist, gradually giving way to a massive, soft, and indubitably grippable ass. What would it be to lie with a woman of such lush muchness, more than was ever truly needed? You got the sense every load-bearing joint was on the cusp of rupturing from strain. The folded flesh ringing her kneecaps put me in the mind of elephants’ eyes. But you could tell she hadn’t always been large. More like a top-flight athlete who’d gone to seed. There remained that sense of agility, flexibility . . . of gameness.
Gail was cute. I mean to say, she had a face she may have had as a teenager. Her body inspired a tactile covetousness: you wanted it to be your hands alone on her body, your lips, your tongue, although secretly you worried it couldn’t possibly be enough. She was the sort of woman men wanted to lock away—but in a good way, a respectful way—to buy her nice things and watch rented movies with in darkened rooms, to make docile and happy but never be viewed in public in her company, for to be seen with such an awesome creature would be an admission of gross and unfeasible appetites.
“Did we wake you?” Lassiter said.
Gail ran a hand through her hair. Thumbed sleep-crust from her eye and flicked it free.
“No, I’m usually up watching Oxi-Clean infomercials at three in the morning.” She smiled at me. “Morning, Cyrus.”
“Morning, Gail
. He insisted.”
“I imagine he did,” she said, as Lassiter slipped past.
“I bear a gift of meatloaf!” In the kitchen, wielding a butcher knife, Lassiter hacked up the brick. Gail sat on the sofa. Her body went down in sections. Gail’s dog, a beagle named Edwina, waddled over and began to lick at Gail’s toenails, which were painted a glossy fire-engine red. Lassiter deposited slabs of meatloaf onto a plate and opened the fridge.
“Ketchup?”
“We’re out,” Gail said.
Lassiter shut the fridge.
“Come downstairs,” he said to me. “See Sissy’s new digs.”
He unlocked the door and flicked the stairwell light. Stubbs’ basement echoed the man himself. Tools meticulously hung on a pegboard, their outlines traced in Sharpie. Boxes labeled Christmas Lights (large) and Christmas Lights (med-large).
Lassiter yanked on strings suspended in the murk, popping lights on. Sissy was wound around a metal support stanchion. Part of her, anyway. The remainder was coiled in the unfinished ceiling: I caught flashes of dappled white-and-caramel scales threaded between the unfinished beams and tufts of pink fiberglass insulation. Her head hung in a tangle of exposed wiring.
“Hey, baby,” Lassiter said, stroking the hog-nosed arrowhead of her face.
I’d been there when Lassiter bought Sissy from a rare pet dealer. A baby Burmese reticulated python. I remember her twining between my fingers like pale rope, tongue flicking at the salt on my skin. I didn’t like Sissy. Frankly, I couldn’t conjure any compelling reason a sane person would fancy such an un-evolved, prehistoric creature—let alone one that was now thick around as a linebacker’s calf. Sissy’s eyes were empty as coins. Fingernail-shaped scales stretched over cold bone and blood . . . nothing but an ice-skinned, carnivorous tube.
“You’re letting her hang out down here?”
“It’s only a few weeks,” Lassiter said. Sissy’s tongue flicked his opened palm. “I’ll build a heated shed out back.”
“Gail’s okay with it?”
“She’s sealed in down here. I plugged the ducts.”
One time I’d watched Sissy eat a foetal pig. Her jaws unhinged to reveal the pink workings of her mouth: a mangle of alien contours and weird vein-ribbed bladders. Her fishhook teeth sunk into the piglet’s hide—the pig had smelled like a pickle, funnily enough. I looked away after that.
