I did shower, though, only because I knew my doctor would be fondling my boys. I couldn’t lose all respect.
“Usually, hard is no good,” Dr. Smarzda said. Old Russian, no-nonsense. “It’s very hard. Like avocado pit.”
I sat back on the paper-covered table. She typed with her ungloved hand on the computer. “I’m ordering ultrasound. A urologist will need to examine results.”
I studied a poster on the wall: the bones of the inner ear. The illustration looked like a map into the center of the earth.
“Do you hear me, Michael?” She had a face like a nun.
“I do.”
“Have you been doing self-exams?”
“I didn’t know I had to.” I couldn’t explain to her how this issue was found. I wondered if the prospect of banging Rosa was all but ruined, if a relationship could begin with me on a death sentence. I hadn’t heard from her, but I hadn’t reached out either.
“Ages twenty-five to thirty-five what we recommend. Your highest risk years.” She typed again. The nasal cavity looked like a moth in a skull with its wings spread.
“Your family have history of cancer?” Her dried old cheeks were wavy like a crimp of wool.
“My grandmother. My father.” I didn’t want to explain. At this point, I wondered what good it’d do. “When will I have the ultrasound done?”
Dr. Smarzda tore off a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Go to reception desk,” she said. “There may be opening today.”
She removed the glove from her hand and dropped it in the can under the sink. All those wasted gloves.
I sat in the ultrasound and radiology waiting area at the Family Health Center in Chelmsford, awaiting my ultrasound with three women who were obviously pregnant, another two who may have been. Only one woman had a man with her. All the pregnant women looked like they needed to be doing something but weren’t. One bit her nails while another shook her leg, the nervous anticipation of a new load of worry. Cuddle time. Middle-of-the-night feedings. I didn’t really know what they were expecting, but I was trying to kill time. The white-haired receptionist chewed her pen while she held a phone to her ear. There was no fish tank. It wasn’t a pediatric waiting room. No one really talked. Everyone just looked down at their phones. The pictures on the walls were faces of famous people on stamps—Elvis and Einstein and Johnny Cash.
I watched a door where I saw a pregnant woman get called in by a nurse. At 1402 hours, a woman came down the hallway behind that door and she called my name: Michael Piccard.
The woman who called me was normal-looking, maybe in her early forties. She wasn’t fat or skinny. Just plain and motherly. I put my phone away and followed her down the hall.
She asked me to state my DOB and I did. She led me into a room with a hospital bed, a large computer monitor, and two chairs. It was dark, the only light a metallic green coming off the monitor. The room smelled like plastic.
She had on thick-rimmed glasses and soft-green scrubs, lines on the corners of her mouth—probably a smoker—and her brown hair was up in a loose bun, held in place with a pencil. She spoke intently, directing me to undress from the waist down.
“First time?”
I nodded.
“Cover your genitals with this.” She handed me a large paper napkin. “I’ll be back shortly.” She left and I did as she asked.
I tried to get comfortable but couldn’t. I wished I’d taken off my hooded sweatshirt. I looked strange with it on. I flattened the paper on my lap. My father had done something like this alone, too. A tube down the throat, endoscopy. The results given tersely. Stage four. A month too late. What better way to hear it? Like a car crash you survive, only to wake up and be told you’re bleeding out, nothing can be done. I couldn’t help but wonder if this were the place I’d be given a final notice on my tenancy. The screen would turn red, brightly even, and mark the spot where the poison had already been delivered, a faint bite in my sleep, leaving no mark, stealthily taking me down without rush.
When the tech came back in, I propped myself up on my elbows like a bikini-clad teenage girl on the beach. I felt even sillier in this pose but didn’t want to readjust so suddenly as to make her aware of my own awareness of my positioning. The tech sat down and didn’t seem to notice.
She put gloves on, then took out a tube and squeezed gel onto a tiny probe. “This helps me see inside. I’m going to start with the left testicle first.” I braced myself for the probe to be cold but it was warm. As she found my hard testicle, I was surprised my penis sat limp on my thigh.
“Yep, you’re the one giving him trouble,” she said to my testicle.
She rolled the probe around and snapped photos on the monitor by tapping a key. She kept her focus on the screen, taking dozens of photos, and I leaned forward to see if I could spot anything strange in them. They just looked like white walnuts floating in space.
“It feels almost like the size of a kumquat.” She typed a few words, and I believe she typed exactly what she had just said, proud of the comparison.
“Is it cancerous?”
She took a few more photos. “I’m not supposed to say. Moms ask, ‘Is it a girl?’ Fathers ask, ‘Is it a boy?’ I’m not supposed to tell.”
“But you know?”
“Fifteen years of doing something makes you an expert in my book. But I’m just a technician. The final say comes from the white coats.”
“Okay. So will I live?” I smiled as if the question were more like “Fries or mashed?”
“ ‘Is that a penis?’ The fathers always see a penis.” She clicked some more.
“This is a bit more concerning than a gender reveal.” I didn’t mean to come off as rude.
She lifted the probe and wiped it on the paper on my lap. The probe nudged my penis.
“The results go directly to the urologist.”
“How about a thumbs-up or down?”
She stared at the pictures on the screen, and then released an aggravated sigh. “I had a father once, a husband, I believe, I actually can’t remember. Whatever, that’s not the point. He begged me to tell him the sex. Like I said, no expert here. His wife kept saying, ‘Cut it out. It’s too early to tell. Leave the poor woman alone.’ I was really holding it in. And she was sort of right; it was a bit early. He was leaning over me, pointing at the screen. His wife was mortified. Tiny little thing. Her belly looked like she wasn’t even pregnant.” She dabbed the probe in the gel again. “They started arguing. He told her it better be a boy. He did everything, cut out soy, tap water, he worked out. She kept telling him it was up to God. You know what he tells her?”
When I realized she was waiting for me to answer, I asked, “What?”
“If it’s not a boy, he doesn’t want it.” She stared at me in disbelief, her thin eyebrows raised, and in that moment she looked like my mother watching the evening news, commenting on the constant evil in the world. “We live on a volcano,” my mother would say. “It’s raining knives. They use crockpots as bombs.”
“What a dick,” I said. My penis remained slinked on my thigh. “Was it a boy?”
“If there was a penis there, I didn’t see it,” she said and began probing again. “Sometimes it’s too early, I get a bad angle, whatever. I’d rather not be the one to change someone’s life because I don’t have the answers that would come next.”
As she kept taking pictures and finding new angles, I thought about how my entire life would change. They’d remove the testicle, maybe I’d have them put it in a jar, stick it on my mantel. I’d get a fresh start on life, just a bit lighter on my left side. A positive result might just be what I needed, a funny story Rosa and I would tell people when asked how we met. “Oh, wait until you hear this one. I saved his life,” she might say.
“You hear that?” she asked, giving me a quick jolt with the probe.
There was a therrrump, therrrump coming over the monitor. “What is that?”
She stopped probing. “Your heartbeat.”
<
br /> They said the urologist rotated between Boston and Chelmsford, so it could be three days before I heard anything. I didn’t tell my mother and I didn’t tell anyone at the jail. I worked my shifts like nothing was wrong, like I wasn’t daydreaming on the tier, mentally compiling a bucket list: Camden Yards, Ireland, anal.
I went to the club on Friday, still without a result. Rosa came up to me right when I walked through the door. I was afraid she’d ask me about my golf ball.
“Have you seen Tito?” she asked me. She looked concerned and rubbed her arms like she was cold. She had on her Mandarin skirt with no top again.
“I just got here,” I said.
“What about Georgia? I’ve done three straight songs,” she said. She looked around the club. Arun was at the bar and a few guys were drinking but no one was sitting around the stage. It’d fill up soon, though.
“Like I said. Just got here. I’ll find them.”
I did a lap of the lounge, asked the bartender if she’d seen Tito—she hadn’t—and decided to go check in his office. My partner Paul would be in at ten and would be asking about Tito too. Tito’s office was behind the stage to the right, on the opposite end of the hall where the powder room was.
After I knocked, I heard something slide across the floor, or a drawer slam, behind the door, even over the bumping house music. Tito didn’t answer. I knocked again. The door swung open. Tito stood there, his face sweaty, his suit jacket off, and his shirt unbuttoned, revealing blacker chest hair than I would have imagined.
“Get in,” he said. He closed the door behind me. On the floor, in front of his desk, lay Georgia. She was on her side, her legs gently moving across the carpet. She was dressed in green lingerie, top and bottom. On the black rug, she looked even whiter, sickly.
I knelt beside Georgia and brushed her hair from her face. I asked Tito what happened.
“She’s overdosing, Mike. What the fuck does it look like?” Tito raked back his hair with his fingers and looked at me with surprise, like he’d been the one who just walked in. His hands and nails were manicured, his face smooth and gray, the skin of a man who used lotion and cleansed. He tried to quell his own anxiety by attempting his affable laugh. He was too intentional.
“Heroin?” I asked.
Tito nodded.
“You too?”
He shook his head. He told me he was going to but Georgia wigged out after she shot and wouldn’t talk or nothing.
“She been using for long?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
I looked around the office. His desk was clear, the yellow leather couch looked clean. The sound I heard must have been Tito hiding the evidence. Strip club owner, heroin user. What was the desire to own a strip club? At what point does a man make such a business decision? And yet I also chose to work at one, and for not much money. I enjoyed the role I was able to assume. I liked seeing Rosa and throwing my weight around. It was good for stress. Maybe Tito liked having the girls whenever he liked.
I studied Georgia. She looked peaceful, her mouth almost in a smile. I thought about how easy it’d be for her to leave, to go away, to just drift off without a fight. I was sweating and thinking. Overdoses happened often on U2, the Classification Unit, the first stop for inmates on their way in. If they had a stash, even remnants of a nest egg tucked in a cavity, it was drained within hours of incarceration. Overdoing it was commonplace, so, as we did with fire extinguishers, we did with Narcan. If she’d been using for long, she might have some skag serum.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Tito.
“Do something, Mike!” Tito yelled.
“I am.”
I ran out of the office. Rosa was onstage. I went to the side of the stage and called her. She stopped dancing immediately and jumped down.
“You find them?” she asked. Her neck had drops of sweat on it. Her eyes looked like she knew what I was about to tell her.
“Does Georgia carry Narcan or something like it?”
Rosa looked down at the ground. “We all have a kit.”
“Get me it,” I said. “Anyone’s.”
Rosa went behind the stage to the powder room. We? Rosa was using too, and not to be judgmental or anything, I had my own issues, but the needle was a bit beyond my acceptable drug usage. A song still played but no one was onstage to dance to it. The half dozen patrons didn’t seem to care. They drank at the bar.
Rosa came back holding a gold handbag down near her crotch. She gave it to me and I opened the bag and looked through. Inside were a few tampons, a condom, bobby pins, and underneath all that, a yellow-capped plastic syringe. I wasn’t angry with Rosa for being a user, instead it added to my affinity for her. She was in a bad place.
We hurried back to Tito’s office. He was sitting on the couch with his face in his hands. Rosa said something about God. I got on the rug and rolled Georgia on her back, uncapped the syringe, stuck the white cone in her nose, and released the Narcan into her nasal cavity.
“Give her five minutes or so.” I looked up at Tito. “Call 911.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. I’ll have to shut down for the night. I can’t afford that. No.”
“Are you for real?” Rosa asked.
“Don’t fucking talk to me like that. Get the fuck out,” Tito said and waved a dismissive hand at her.
Georgia’s breathing ramped up, and she picked at the carpet with her index finger. Rosa didn’t leave.
“Both of you, out!” Tito said.
“What were you going to do,” I asked, “if I didn’t come in? Just let her die?”
“I say she’s fine,” Tito said, his accent pouring on thick in the heated moment, with an added emphasis on say and fine.
I put my hand on Rosa’s back as we left the office. Tito slammed the door shut behind us. There was a part of me that wanted to go back into the office and demand he call, another part of me that said maybe I should just call. I didn’t feel compelled to do either. I wished I wasn’t so comfortable with people in distress: suicide attempts, beatings, drug overdoses. I wished I wasn’t numb to that. I wondered if I’d feel more empathy, feel more badly, for a socialite on her yacht, soaked and cooked in sun, her skin red and bubbling. If I’d feel more for her plight. Or a paperboy shortchanged by a customer—would that be worse to me than where Georgia was? What about mine? Had I a plight? Not yet. I had a meddlesome problem that hadn’t quite elevated to desperate news but the uncertainty was overwhelming my future forecasts.
I went with Rosa to the powder room. She washed the makeup off her face all the while bitching about Tito. He’s a cunt. A cocksucker. She looked prettier without makeup. She changed into her casual clothes of a pink zip-up hoodie and tight jeans, a butterfly stitched into the back pocket. She put her hair up.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Rosa said. “Tonight’s been exactly what I needed.”
“I hear you.”
“Let’s go on the beach. Let’s get a bottle of something, just me and you.”
I nodded and her mouth went wide.
The club was starting to fill up, the girls were being circled, smiling as if willingly ready to be devoured, but their side-glances at me as I walked by them was a reminder that this was all a game where men were pulled to the gates of Heaven but not allowed in.
I saw Paul with his elbow on the bar, keeping a close eye on Arun, who was stroking a girl’s black hair. DJ Salazar told everyone to give it up for the Mouth from the South, the freckled firestarter, Miss Georgia. They did. He didn’t know Georgia wouldn’t be joining. Tito came out of his office and walked over to the DJ booth.
We made our way through the men who laughed and stuck money in their mouths. White lights crisscrossed the stage, then ran through the lounge and back behind the stage. Another dancer climbed up the pole with no introduction.
The bar had three shelves of liquor bottles. A red fluorescent light poured brightly over the top shelf of bottles before it diluted and failed and left the botto
m shelf dark. The bartender sprayed soda and tilted a bottle of rum into a glass. She chewed gum and had pigtails. Her stomach was exposed, compact and lined with soft muscle. A man leaned over the bar. She leaned in, and he whispered into her ear. Paul was distracted simultaneously by a group of rowdy college kids and Arun’s stroking hands. Rosa walked over to Arun.
“He’s got a tiny dick,” she told the girl with him. “Real tiny.”
I grabbed a bottle of liquor from the bottom shelf and grabbed Rosa. We went out into the night, where a motorcycle dragged by us with a gurgle as we hurried across the highway, past the batting cages and motorcycle line toward the beach.
The moon was bright and had turned the beach gray. Our feet sank in the sand like it was freshly poured concrete. The air near the ocean was much colder than at the club, almost like they were two different geographical regions. The beach was empty. I gripped the bottle and held it up to the moonlight.
“Banana schnapps?” Rosa asked as she rose onto her toes to read the label. In her closeness I could smell her. She smelled like the shampoo section at Target, the aisles I never had to go down. She bumped me with her hip playfully, hitting me on my thigh.
“It’s a bottle of liquor, and we just quit our jobs. Do you really care what it is?” I was disappointed too.
“No. And we quit our night jobs. We still have day jobs.”
“Lucky us for that,” I said and unscrewed the cap and took a whiff. “Holy shit. You first.” I handed Rosa the bottle, and she grabbed it with both hands. Her weight shifted forward like I’d handed her a sandbag.
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