Boca Mournings

by Steven M. Forman

  I had been shot in the shoulder the first time in 1970. My left leg was hit in ‘76. The bat to my knees was 1982. These isolated incidents from my ancient history as a Boston cop had melded into a single nightmare . . . except for the second shot to the right shoulder that happened only last year in Boca Raton. Boca? What was I doing in Boca Raton?

  I had been one of Boston’s most decorated policemen from 1966 to 2000, but now I was just a sixty-year-old retired cop living in Florida. I was five feet seven and weighed slightly over my fighting weight. I was in great shape for an antique and there was a beautiful woman in my bed. She was fifty-percent black Haitian, fifty-percent white European, and twenty percent more than fifty percent my age. Best of all, she was one-hundred-percent awesome.

  When I retired to Boca last year I expected to live a peaceful life as a golf-course ranger in a gated community called Boca Heights. Things didn’t work out. I quit the ranger job after a few days because three women golfers refused their right to remain silent. Later that same afternoon I uncovered a Russian Mafia crime ring in Boca and survived a shootout with them. In less than a year I had solved a local mystery, stopped an assault on two women, and went to war with an army of neo- Nazis. My exploits received a lot of attention from the press.

  A local news reporter dubbed me the “Boca Knight” and when a CNN reporter asked me, on national television, to define a Boca Knight I said, “Anyone willing to fight for everyone’s right to live in peace,” which was all that came to mind.

  Suddenly everyone wanted to be a Boca Knight because everyone could be a Boca Knight. It was easy: live and let live. Boca Knights baseball caps and T-shirts began appearing in Palm Beach County. I was a mini celebrity.

  I didn’t feel so famous standing by the toilet waiting to pee and when I finally did it was a weak effort. I trudged back to the bedroom and looked at the woman in my bed. She was one of the damsels in distress I had rescued. Good save!

  I eased back under the covers, trying not to wake her. She stirred in her sleep, parted her luscious lips, and groaned.

  Again!

  I squinted at the illuminated numbers on the bedside clock.

  Again? I wondered aloud. It’s two thirty in the morning.”

  I don’t care.

  We did it again.

  4:15 a.m.

  You’re kidding me, right? I said, opening my eyes.

  No, I’m serious. We have to do it again.

  I felt like I was in a Nike commercial.

  5:30 a.m.

  That’s it. I’ve had it, I said, sitting up in bed.

  One more time.

  Can’t you control yourself?

  No.

  We did it again then slept three straight hours.

  8:30 a.m.

  I woke up and watched the breathtaking woman next to me taking shallow breaths while she slept. I found it hard to believe that a woman so young and gorgeous was actually with me. I kissed her beautiful brown face.

  Good morning, Claudette, Mr. Johnson, my penis said in a voice only I could hear. Mr. Johnson and I have been together for as long as I can remember, although we didn’t start communicating until I was about eleven. He just popped up one night in bed and introduced himself.

  Hey, look at me. I can stand up.

  In the beginning, our relationship was touch and go, but we eventually reached an understanding. He agreed to stop showing up at school and family gatherings, and I agreed to a more hands-on relationship when we were alone.

  Mr. Johnson poked Claudette’s side. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, I heard him say.

  Claudette couldn’t hear him, of course, but she understood him perfectly. She smiled without opening her eyes and reached for him.

  I gotta hand it to you, Mr. Johnson said.

  “And what do we have here?” She asked in a husky morning voice.

  Your breakfast sausage, said my one-eyed friend.

  “Didn’t you get enough last night?”

  Redundant question.

  “So what did you have in mind,” she teased me with a grin.

  How ‘bout blowing revelry? Mr. Johnson suggested.

  Sex with Claudette Permice was a wild, exuberant, pulverizing experience that usually ended with Mr. Johnson needing first aid. Claudette looked like Halle Berry. Once, while we were having sex, she punched my shoulder and told me to stop pretending she was Halle Berry.

  “I’m not pretending you’re Halle Berry,” I assured her.

  “Then why do you keep screaming ‘Fuck me, Halle’?”

  “Sorry.”

  Making love and having sex with Claudette Permice were two different things, and I loved that about her.

  “Man, you’re good, Eddie,” she said when our morning session was over. “You’re a sixty-year-old wonder.”

  Thank you, thank you, Mr. Johnson said. He bowed and just kept going down.

  “Almost sixty-one,” I reminded her, “And I’m not ashamed to tell you I’m exhausted.”

  “No wonder,” Claudette said swinging her long, gorgeous, coffee-colored legs out of bed. “You got up to pee three times last night.”

  “Nice ass, Halle,” I said, watching her walk to the bathroom and wanting to change the subject.

  “Never mind my ass,” she said.

  She turned to face me with her hands on her hips.

  I tried changing the subject a second time. “Great tits, Halle.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject,” she said. “You were talking in your sleep in bed and talking to yourself in the bathroom.”

  “I wasn’t talking to myself,” I said defensively.

  “Oh, really? Who were you talking to?”

  How could I tell her I was talking to my penis? I had shared that secret with only my beloved late wife, Patty, who responded to my revelation by saying, “All you men are alike.”

  But that was more than twenty years ago. Claudette Permice was nothing like Patty McGee Perlmutter. But, I decided to take a risk and share my secret.

  I tried to break it to her gently. “I was talking to my penis.”

  “All you men are alike,” she said. “I suppose the little fella has a name.”

  “Mr. Johnson,” I said, “And watch that word ‘little.’”

  “And what were you and Mr. Johnson talking about?” she asked with a tired sigh. “All I heard was something about again and not again.”

  “He kept waking me up to pee,” I answered honestly. “I was talking to him about timing.”

  “I’ll tell you about timing,” Claudette said. “The two of you woke me up at two thirty, four fifteen, and five thirty.”

  “Thank you, Big Ben.”

  “And after all that talking you peed like a gerbil.”

  “Oh, so now you don’t like the way I pee?”

  “You used to pee like a racehorse,” she explained. “Not a seahorse.”

  “Now you’ve gone too far,” I said.

  “When was your last physical?” she asked.

  “President Carter’s administration.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am being serious. He was our thirty-ninth president.”

  “I want you to have a prostate exam,” she insisted.

  “No. And that’s final.”

  “Today.”

  “Okay.”

  We went to the yellow medical building on Clint Moore Road. I stopped at the directory. I was in no hurry for a prostate exam.

  “What’s nephrology?” I asked, reading the directory.

  “Kidney problems,” Claudette, a registered nurse, told me.

  “What’s ANP?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t notice I was stalling.

  She tugged my arm. “Adult Nurse Practitioner, and stop stalling.”

  I dug in my heels. “What about RD?”

  “Registered Dietician,” she said impatiently. “C’mon. These appointments are hard to get. We’re lucky he had a cancellation at three.”

  4:45 p.m.

 
; “I’m gonna kill someone,” I whispered. “We’ve been waiting two hours.”

  “Be patient,” Claudette spoke to me like I was a child.

  “Why do I have to be patient to be a patient?”

  “Fill out your questionnaire,” she told me.

  “I did that an hour ago,” I complained.

  QUESTIONNAIRE/ANSWERS

  Q: Are you married?

  A: Why do you ask?

  Q: Do you wear a hearing aid?

  A: What?

  Q: Are you allergic to anything?

  A: Questionnaires.

  Q: Are you an organ donor?

  A: What organ and who’s asking.

  Q: Is it painful when you urinate?

  A: No. It’s painful when I can’t.

  Q: On a scale of zero to ten, how would you describe your pain?

  A: The pain in my ass from waiting is a ten!

  Q: Do you have a primary doctor?

  A: No, but I do have a primary nurse.

  I went to the men’s room and when I returned I approached the stonefaced, blue-haired receptionist.

  “Has anyone ever died of old age in this waiting room?” I asked.

  Before the receptionist could answer Claudette was standing next to me. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said, ushering me to my seat. “He’s not well.”

  “And I’m not getting any better,” I complained.

  “Try thinking of something pleasant,” Claudette said, shushing me.

  I thought about strangling the doctor.

  Then I asked myself, “What am I doing here?”

  I’m the grandson of a legend: Sirota the Orphan, sole survivor of a pogrom in the Ukraine when he was two years old. Thirteen years later the fearless son of a bitch jumped on the back of a five-hundred-pound brown bear and stabbed it to death with a stolen Cossack dagger.

  Then he walked from the Ukraine, across Eastern Europe, wrapped in a brown bear skin, armed only with that dagger. In Hamburg, Germany, he boarded a ship bound for Boston wearing a dead man’s clothes and carrying bloody documents that identified him as Hans Perlmutter. The real Hans Perlmutter, a German teenager with terminal tuberculosis, rested in peace at the bottom of Hamburg harbor, wrapped in a brown bear skin.

  My grandfather settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, married a Ukrainian girl he had known in the Old Country, and had one son, Harry.

  I was Harry’s son, but I was more the second coming of my grandfather. I was a street fighter as a kid, an undefeated Golden Gloves boxing champion as a teenager, and one of Boston’s most respected policemen as an adult.

  I never feared jumping on the bear’s back. The bears feared me.

  I married my high-school sweetheart, Patty McGee, in 1964. She died of a brain aneurism twenty years later. I never remarried. Twenty years after Patty died, I retired.

  In 2004, I moved to Boca Raton where I had now sat in a room for two hours, waiting for some inconsiderate asshole to stick his finger up mine.

  “Is this fair?” I asked myself.

  I went to the bathroom for the third time. When I returned, I resumed my reverie.

  In the short time I had been in Boca I had gone from an obscure golf-course ranger to the legendary Boca Knight. I thought I was someone special. After this two-hour wait, however, I was reminded that I was just another Social Security schmuck at the mercy of the system.

  I went to the men’s room for the fourth time and shoved the heavy bathroom door open. It banged against the wall and a short old man leaning over the sink bolted upright, startled.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He stared at me but said nothing. I noticed he was wearing a Boca Knights hat and had a slight head tremor. His eyes were red and glassy, but there were no tears.

  “You’re a Boca Knight?” I asked, pointing at his hat.

  “Usetabe,” he nodded, and shuffled out the door.

  I followed, watching him moving slowly toward the elevator. His body language, his voice, and his ten-mile stare seemed familiar to me.

  When I returned to the doctor’s office, Claudette was agitated.

  “They called your name. The doctor’s waiting for you.”

  “Let him wait,” I said.

  5:15 p.m.

  Tall, handsome Dr. Alan Koblentz stood behind his desk reading my questionnaire.

  “Mr. Perlmutter,” he smiled. “Interesting answers.”

  “I had plenty of time to be creative.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. “It’s an honor to meet the Boca Knight.”

  “You could have had the honor two hours ago,” I told him.

  “I’ve had a busy day,” he explained without apology.

  “Yeah, well, keeping people waiting for hours takes hours,” I said.

  “You’ve made your point.”

  “No, I haven’t. You’ll do the same thing tomorrow.”

  “Mr. Perlmutter,” the doctor said politely, “I haven’t got time for this-”

  “Neither do I,” I interrupted. “And neither do the people sitting out there.”

  “Perhaps you should see another doctor,” Dr. Koblentz suggested with no remorse. He might as well have said, “Fuck you, I have plenty of patients.”

  “I will see another doctor,” I said. “But before I go, I want to ask you a question,”

  He nodded tiredly. “What’s your question?”

  “Are your parents alive?” I asked.

  My question surprised him. “Yes. Why?”

  “How would you feel if a doctor kept them waiting for two hours?”

  He blinked. I had hit a nerve, but he didn’t answer.

  “Let me answer for you,” I said. “I bet you’d be as pissed off as I am right now.”

  “Did you actually wait two hours just to tell me off?” he asked.

  “No. I waited the first hour for my exam. I waited the second hour to tell you off.”

  “Medical care doesn’t run on a schedule, Mr. Perlmutter.”

  “Is that the answer you’d give your mother?” I challenged him.

  He paused a moment. “Point well taken,” he finally conceded.

  He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just so full of himself there wasn’t room for anyone else.

  “Would an apology make you feel better?” he asked.

  “If you apologize to every person in the waiting room . . . yes, I’d feel better,” I told him. “Maybe you would, too.”

  “Don’t you think you’re carrying this a little too far?”

  “I don’t know. Ask your mother?”

  He either loved his mother very much or was scared shit of her. In either event, he walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the waiting room.

  “Hi, everyone,” he said to the remaining patients. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long. I’m willing to work as late as it takes to see all of you or I’ll come in Saturday. Just tell the receptionist what you want to do.”

  “Did Eddie Perlmutter threaten to beat you up?” Claudette asked.

  “He beat me up verbally,” Dr. Koblentz admitted.

  “He can do that, too,” Claudette said.

  The doctor closed the door.

  “Now, what’s your problem, besides a short temper?” he asked me.

  “I’m having trouble peeing,” I told him.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Have you ever had a prostate exam?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “What is it?”

  “It’s a finger inserted in your anus-”

  “Yeah, I’ve had that done,” I interrupted.

  “Who was the doctor?”

  “It was a nurse.”

  “That doesn’t count.”

  “Damn.” I cleared my throat. “Do I really need this?”

  “You could have a prostate problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Worst-case scenario, prostate cancer. We need to do blood work for tha
t test.”

  Fuck!

  “My guess is it’s just an enlarged prostate, inhibiting your urine flow. It’s very common.” Dr. Koblentz pulled on a rubber glove. “Drop your pants.” He extended his arm like a maitre d’ showing me to a table.

  “Could we have dinner first?” I asked, assuming the position.

  Draped over the examining table, I had a decent view of the outside and I saw the old man from the men’s room in the parking lot. A bell went off in my head as a finger went up my butt.

  I flinched. “Hey!”

  “Relax,” Dr. Koblentz repeated. “It’s just a little KY Jelly.”

  “It’s déjà vu,” I told him.

  “You said you never had a digital exam before,” he reminded me while poking around.

  “I’m talking about that guy,” I said, pointing out the window. “I remember where I saw that look.”

  “What guy?” Dr. Koblentz didn’t back out. “What look?”

  With his finger wending its way to my prostate it was hard to explain the “life is no longer worth living” look of the hopeless. So, I pointed and shouted, “That guy, that look . . . and take your finger out of my ass.”

  I yanked his hand away and pushed off the table

  “Easy, Eddie,” the doctor protested, rubbing his wrist.

  “Sorry, Doc,” I said as I bunny-hopped toward the door. “Call nine-one-one.”

  “This is not an emergency,” he insisted.

  “Doc, trust me,” I shouted. “Call nine-one-one.”

  I must have looked like I was in a potato-sack race as I hopped through the waiting room, pulling up my pants.

  “Eddie Perlmutter,” Claudette called after me. “You come back here.”

  I finally got my pants up and ran to the elevator. I waited a moment then took the stairs instead, using the railings on each side of the staircase like an ancient acrobat.

  The KY Jelly squished in my pants as I hobbled outside. I saw the old man getting into an old Lincoln.

  “Hey,” I shouted, waving my arms. “Wait.”

  I was about twenty yards away when he looked at me, tipped his hat, shut the door, and put something to his head. I heard the shot and saw his brains splatter on the driver’s window. His head slumped against the spiderweb cracks in the glass created by the bullet’s exit. The hat was still on his head but this Boca Knight was dead.