Me and the Devil: A Novel (35 page)

I was dead.

T
HE LONG DARK PASSAGE, THE DARK PASSAGE LONGER THAN
life. It could have been forever. It was only three days. When I first came to, I had no idea where I was. All I could remember was that I, whoever I was, had slept the deepest, most sublime sleep I had ever slept, and, for the first time, with dreams that were sweet and rapturous. That night-world teacup carnival ride in which those old men gaily relived the memories of the smut of their pasts—not erotica, nothing so cheap or stupid as that—in Fellini’s strange, funny, and frightening
City of Women.
Or could that slowly swirling rising and falling teacup ride have been from another Fellini picture? No, it must have been
La Città delle Donne.
The colors were so lush. No matter: I had been there, dreaming without a care with the other old dreamers in the dream of that midnight dreamland ride of dreams, weaving round and round, reliving the luscious moments of life that were now alive again in dreams truer than any truth from which they had been born.

I remembered little else of what I dreamt. I felt more rested and more replenished than any sleep had ever left me feeling. This was short-lived, as I soon became aware that I was physically restrained. My wrists and elbows were bound to the side rails of the bed in which I lay. In time someone stood over me.

“You were in a coma for three days,” he told me. “Every once in awhile you seemed about to come out of it. You were still out of
it, still unconscious, when that happened, but whenever it did, you pulled the IV catheters out of your arms. We had to strap you down to keep you from doing that. Your life signs were pretty bad there for a while. It didn’t seem that you were going to come out of that coma. And when it did, you yanked out the tubes that were keeping you alive. You’re a lucky man.”

“And what’s in those tubes?”

“Saline solution and glucose.”

I didn’t ask. All I said was, “Well, I guess we can unstrap me now.”

He left. Apparently it was beneath him to perform a menial task such as removing lengths of white tape. A black orderly came in a few minutes later and freed me.

“Welcome back, buddy,” he said. “Where you been? Anywhere interestin’?”

I managed a worn-out laugh. He put to my mouth a straw that protruded from the sealed plastic lid of a plastic container.

“Here you go,” he said. “This Bud’s for you.” He waited for me to take the straw between my lips. “Can you get that down?” It was water, and I got it down. “Man, you might be havin’ yourself a reg’lar dinner in bed tonight.”

I liked this guy better than the other guy.

In time the IV catheters were removed from my arms. They shot me up with something, then something else again, then yet again something else.

I was weak as hell, and disoriented. I could barely make it to the toilet to piss. But there was no delirium tremens. It was amazing. What was that shit they had shot me up with? They told me one was an anti-seizure drug. They told me the name of it, but I forgot. They would not tell me what the other drugs were, but I figured they had something to do with how all those alky and dope-addicted doctors made it to the office in the morning and
they didn’t want to reveal these remedies to common drunks or junkies like me.

The strawberry Jell-O that night was so good I asked for more, and they gave it to me. There were three other guys in the room with me, in various stages of getting well or croaking; it was hard to tell which. One guy introduced himself to me from his bed across the room. He lowered the sheet and cover, then peeled back a big patch of rubber from his abdomen, revealing a hole of sorts from which bubbles of shit emerged.

“Think I’m gonna die?” he asked me. He looked dead already.

“No, man,” I said. “No way. You’ll be out of here before you know it.”

That seemed to cheer him a bit. But where was here? I did not even know what hospital I was in. All I knew was that, wherever I was, I wanted to get out.

Except for trips to the toilet, I lay in bed for three days. The shots came to an end. My blood was monitored regularly, insulin was delivered. In one of those trips to the toilet, I noticed with clear eyes how absolutely disgusting I was. My inner thighs, crotch, and ass were crusted thick with dried shit. There was a bath-and-shower room in the hall for ambulatory patients. I shaved, showered, and washed my hair under the watch of an orderly. I rubbed myself dry with a clean towel, put on a fresh Hospitex robe, combed my hair, and cleaned my nails. I asked for fresh bedding for my bed, and after some discussion, it was agreed that the bed rails could be removed as well.

And yet they kept me there another three days, performing every medical test on me that they could come up with, to wring every dollar from me that they could. For some of these tests I had to fast for a day in preparation. They found some sort of mushroom farm inside my throat, and only after further costly tests—it seemed, according to them, that this gullet fungus was
often a symptom of AIDS or some such thing—only then, after there was no more money to be made from probing this anomaly, did a senior doctor appear to dismiss it all to a doctor within my earshot with the words: “Oh, he’s been using his esophagus for nothing but drinking and smoking for so long; that’s all that is.”

The ophthalmologist had a pleasant disposition, and, with an ulterior motive, I began making small talk with him as he examined me. I told him of a cousin—less suspect as a subterfuge for oneself, I figured, than the invented generic friend—who had perfect vision but whose eyes seemed to change colors often and with great rapidity.

“Sounds like some kind of iridial anisochromia,” he said abstractedly, intent on my own eyes. “It has to do with the flow of blood in the back of the eye, with the pigmented tissue in the eye, the density of cells in the iris. All sorts of things. Sometimes it passes, brought on by stress or sudden changes to metabolic balances. People who have permanently multicolored eyes—central heterochromia—are called cat-eyed.”

Fucking Keith. Fucking me, staring into the mirror, going around in those dark shades.

The second or third time blood was drawn from me, I asked what type of blood I had. The guy said, “You don’t know your blood type? You should.” He looked down at my chart. “You’re type A.”

No mention of B glycoproteins, no mention of anything. Fucking labs.

Once the croakers were done with me, the head-case guys took over. The first of them asked me a series of questions, sort of like a test of some kind. One of the questions was “What does the phrase ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ mean to you?” I knew how to play these guys.

“It’s like what Aristotle said: ‘You can’t pour water into a full
pitcher.’ If a person refuses to empty his mind of long-held beliefs, he can accept no new, different, and better beliefs or ways of thinking and behaving. They will just overflow and be lost.”

Aristotle had said no such thing. It was an impromptu paraphrase of some Zen jive about only an empty mind being ready and prepared to accept new wisdom. I think the Zen saying employed a full teacup—oh, that ride, that beautiful ride and that beautiful coma and its beautiful dreamy sleep—rather than a full pitcher. But in rendering the adage of the doctor’s question in a more eloquent way and attributing it to Aristotle, I accomplished several things. I showed him, through my sham interpretation, that I was aware of the importance, even the need, of accepting change. I showed him that I was familiar with Aristotle, one of the pillars of Western learning, on which his own education had been based, and was therefore a man to be distinguished from the usual grist of his mill. (Assuming that he had never read Aristotle was a very safe shot; and even if he had tried to read him, he would have thought, without daring to reveal it, that he had missed or forgotten this pitcher business. In getting him to accept this phony Aristotelian syllogism, I gained the upper hand. To attribute it truthfully, to Zen, would have led him to suspect me of being a bit “off,” especially as he was of neither Japanese nor Chinese descent.) In sum, I showed him—or, rather, gave him the quite convincing impression—that I was sane and fully equipped to see and correct the wrongfulness of my ways.

This doctor was followed only minutes later by another man in a white smock. He proceeded to ask me the very same questions that the previous crackpot had asked me. A check for consistency, for stability of mind. He was a diminutive Filipino.

“Are you an intern here?” I asked with feigned interest and kindness after the first question I had been asked was repeated by him. I smiled gently.

He said that, yes, he was.

“Oh,” I said with subdued mock surprise, “that’s why you’re asking me the same questions the doctor just asked me. This must be part of your training. Well, he already has the answers that I gave. But if this is a matter of comparing your notes to his, I’ll be happy to repeat my answers for you.”

He thanked me, and I went through that rigmarole with false patience, false good cheer, and just a tad of added explication here and there as if to help him out in view of his lesser experience and erudition than the previous quack.

After lunch I called my friend Frankie. His was the only telephone number I remembered other than my own. I told him where I was, asked him to bring me a new pair of pants, a new pair of socks, a new shirt, a pack of Parliaments, a box of NicoDerm patches, a pack of lined index cards, and a pen. While I was on the phone, they wheeled out the corpse of the guy who had asked me if I thought he was going to live.

That afternoon they took me to the office of the chief nutcracker. He had you at a disadvantage right there: him sitting there in his impeccable white shirt and asshole Hermès necktie beneath what seemed to be a formal, custom-tailored, impeccable white smock, and you in a cheap chair across the desk from him in a flimsy cotton hospital gown that barely covered your balls and kept slipping from your shoulder as he held forth with an air of superiority.

“When you were brought here,” he began, his eyes rising from the clipboard chart before him to look perfunctorily into my own eyes, “you were suffering from severe alcohol poisoning, malnutrition, dehydration, and other life-threatening conditions that brought about a state of coma. You also upon entering exhibited all the symptoms of what is called a schizophreniform disorder. It may also have been what is called a brief psychotic disorder. The difference
between the two is one of duration. A brief psychotic disorder lasts from a day to a month. Schizophreniform disorder lasts from a month to six months. Both are serious and, combined with periods of alcoholic drinking or other forms of substance abuse, can deter the natural remittance of these disorders and result in what we call substance-induced psychotic disorder or even full-blown schizophrenia and psychosis.” He looked perfunctorily again into my eyes and said, “You, my friend, have been playing with fire.” A blasé theatricality in his voice led me to believe that this was one of his standard lines. “If there is a next time, the fire will win.”

But, ah, the sweet sleep, the sweet dream, the sweet teacup ride! As I thought of these things, I presented the figure of one who heeded and hung on his every word.

Frankie, as I knew he would, came through for me. I wrote on the first of the index cards, in the best penmanship I could: “What a fool. All these years. All this wasted time.” On other cards I wrote a lot of toned-down versions of half-remembered lines from Milton—notes for my new book, I would say, if asked. I placed two of the nicotine patches on my upper arms, left the opened box conspicuously on the bed, then went into the toilet for a smoke. A couple of nurses smelled it, but the opened box of nicotine patches on the bed worked well.

“At least he’s trying,” I heard one of the nurses say to the other.

I trashed my old puke-stained, shit-stained, piss-stained pants and shirt and stinking socks. The pants, shirt, and socks Frankie had brought me waited neatly in the narrow little locker near my bed.

The valedictory address came the next morning.

“I hope you know,” the young doctor said, “that if you take another drink, the next ride you take after that will be with a sheet over your head.”

I did my best to assure him with my facial expression and a slight, repentant nod that I was well aware of this. It had to have been almost thirty years since I had first heard that line of shit.

“I strongly advise that you go to A.A. and get yourself a sponsor,” he said.

“I’ve already called someone about that,” I lied.

“You might also look into Silver Hills. It’s only about an hour or so from here, in New Canaan. I can’t speak highly enough of it.”

“Do you have a brochure or something?” I asked with convincing interest and sincerity, with just the right hint of trepidation in my voice.

“I’ll look. If not, you can just call there.” He wrote down the name and location on one of my index cards. “You can find it on the Internet, too.”

I sat on the edge of the bed silently, as if waiting for, even hoping for, him to say more. Then I said simply, quietly, “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Remember,” he said, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But you can’t do it alone.”

Fucking punk. What was he, half my age? What did he know from tough.

When he stood to leave, I stood. I thanked him again, put out my hand to shake his.

I got dressed, signed my extortion papers, and got out of there, grinning, lighting a smoke, free under the crisp blue sky in the breezy morning air. De day ob jubilee!