Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (19 page)

The television company got back in touch a week ago saying they thought the clip of my father falling off the cliff was hilarious and that they hoped no one was injured during the process. Enclosed was a check for two hundred and fifty pounds, and their best wishes. 

When the old man first arrived in hospital, I asked Mum why he wouldn’t wake up, she told me he was dreaming of something really special and he didn’t want that dream to end. I would just sit there and watch him breathing in and out, in and out, wondering if in that dream he was peeling back the rind of a Florida orange while the sun burnt his shadow into the ground. And when there were no words to share, no heartache, sadness or regret spilling from my mouth, I would close my eyes and see him splitting that orange apart, his teeth biting into its sweet flesh until it stained his shirt.

——————————

Bad, Bad, Bad Bad Men

by
Craig Davidson

“Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.”

That may have been what I said, or something equally banal. Make like a tree and get out of here. Nice knowing you, fruitcake. I’m not exactly a titan of wit, besides which, I happened to be dogshit drunk.

First you take a drink, next the drink takes a drink, next the drink takes you. Don’t know who said that, but I admire the sentiment. They say the first step to getting better is admitting you got a problem. I care fuckall for that, but who wants to live in denial? There comes a day where it’s: screw it, fine, I’m a juicehead.

For me, that was when the mechanics of fixing a drink got so imprinted I could make one blind. Two tablespoonfuls sugar in a Collins glass, sprigs of mint, muddle, pulverized ice, bourbon to taste. The point arrives where you’ve made so many it’s reflex-memory. You could be robot arms on an assembly line.

It’s only fair to mention—really, it’s a crucial corollary to all this—that by then I’d taken to drinking mint juleps. Primarily as ‘bourbon to taste’ could mean half a pint.

Mint-
fucking
-juleps! Ought to invest in a string tie, get me a touch of that Colonel-Sanders-Kentucky-Fried southern class.

Now the guy I’d said it to, he turns back. We—and when I say ‘we,’ I mean the nameless shambles I bend elbows with at this scratch-ass bar, Honey’s, on Pine Street—we are rather stunned at this development. Me especially. This guy—who, I should hasten to add, was by then stalking to where I sat slumped next to a promotional cutout of Oscar De La Hoya; Oscar hawking Tekate—beer of
Aztecs
!—Oscar’s skin yellowed with smoke, Oscar’s eyes torched out with a Zippo, anyway, this swinging dick was not a regular. Which is why I said what I said, right? The guy was an outsider and should expect to be scorned by us regulars, who have built up our cred simply by participating in this grotesque carnival of human misery for much, much longer.

99% of the time they say:
Fuck it, what do I care what these degenerates think?
Which was the whole angle of my gambit: you gauge the chances you’ll get away with it versus the possibility it’ll earn you five in the eye.

Fuck me, why would I yearn to impress these assholes? It’s not like we pass a peacock feather around and recite our favorite passages from Iron John. Fact is, I hated them the way you hate your own face in the mirror the next morning. But here I was lipping off a stranger in hopes it’d elicit a chuckle out of these candy-colored dildos.

“What did you say?”

I was staring at the face of a flinty Norse God. Not a shred of compassion in the guy’s shark-grey eyes.

“What did I say?” I parroted back, giving him a wonky smile in hopes he’d peg me for a useless hairbag not worth bruising his knuckles over.

His punch was telegraphed from
next week
. His spine arched and his fist nearly touched his heels—like how old movie cowboys threw a punch. I’ll get out the way, I said to myself. Shift my chin a smidge, or hell, slide off the stool, slip out the back door—Sayonara, shitheels!—and be halfway down the block before this guy even

I woke up on the floor. My feet were tangled up in the brass footrail. My nose all mushy, plus the taste of blood in my throat. The guy who’d cold-cocked me had taken the pains to turn me on my side so I wouldn’t choke to death on my own puke—which, to give him his fair due, was a pretty sporting move. Thanks, masked stranger!

“Anyone calling the paramedics?” somebody said, without much enthusiasm. 

“To the best of my knowledge,” said the bartender, “he
is
the paramedics.”

I snuck into the bay at Niagara Falls Memorial, hugging the wall like a safecracker. Acid-core halogens scorched my corneas as I ducked into an ambulance. After licking the head of an extra-large Q-tip I’d dug out of an Ambu-Care tackle box, I tore open a pouch of hemostat coagulant powder, dunked the Q-tip and swabbed out both nostrils. The busted capillaries fused shut—it felt like a rug burn.

I considered my face in the steel mirror above the brace kits. Blood in the chinks of my teeth. I tried to root it out with a fingernail but when that failed I unscrewed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It fizzed the chancre sore on my tongue.

I hunted up a baggie of Dextrose 30%—sugar water, basically, but if I mainline it into your cephalic vein it’s a $200 connection fee, billed to your HMO—snipped the stint-plug with surgical shears and squeezed the warm treacle down my throat to jack some glucose into my anemic cells.

“I remember different days,” I said to my reflection, and smiled. “Do you?”

Exiting the ambulance, I felt vaguely human. I showered alone, sucking down another baggie of Dextrose to quiet the keening scream in my blood. Fingers knit together, I hung off the showerhead like a prisoner in a Turkish gulag.

After donning my paramedic’s whites, I found Lassiter in the cafeteria. He stood with a cook at the kitchen pass. Lassiter was tight with the cooks and janitors, the shipper-receivers. The cook was handing Lassiter a brick of leftover meatloaf.

One of the Emerg nurses had been demoted to skeleton shift. She was ragging out her Charge Nurse to a table of bored orderlies.

“Man comes in with three fingers in a handkerchief, sawed off at a construction site,” she said. “Another man comes in with mild chest pains. No-fingers man gets first. Man with chest pains takes a seat. Now if that man
told
me he was taking nitrogen pills, like he’s s’posed to . . . so that man’s heart explodes”—in her mouth it’s
esplows
—“in the waiting room and that’s on
me
?”

“I heard it was on his chart,” said Lassiter. 

“What was on?” said the nurse, a hot coal in each eye.

“That he’d been prescribed nites.” 

“On a Post-it stuck to it, is all.” 

Lassiter said, “Right where you could see it.” 

“What do you even know, meat-wagon jockey?” She angled her boneless face at Lassiter. Her feeble defiance stirred pity in me. “You even know my CN? Even know who we’re talking about?”

“She’s the frumpy bitch with a face like a rotted hornet’s nest, right? No, wait, that’s somebody else, that’s, that’s, that’s . . .”
Snap!
went Lassiter’s fingers. “That’s
you
, you ghastly old lesbian.”

Next we were in the light-washed ambulance bay, Lassiter licking the juice from the tinfoil-wrapped brick off his fingers.

“You drive,” he told me.

I cranked the wheel left, motoring north. Summer dusk in Cataract City. Down Pine Street, past the spot of my most recent humiliation. College kids colonized the patio at Unc’s, sucking down ice-filled buckets of creamy cervezas. The muscles knitted at the back of my neck as tension spread across my clavicles. We passed Sharkey’s, a biker bar. Last week, we’d responded to a 9-1-1 call there. A young hogger beat half to death in an initiation ritual. His scalp was covered in bloody ant hills. Lassiter pinched the kid’s incisors off the floor and bounced them in his palm like a pair of hot dice.

“These aren’t your milk teeth, dummy.”

The kid’s license said he was seventeen. The bikers leaned on blood-streaked pool cues with thick blue elastic bands cinching their goatees.

“Did they sell it as an act of deep nobility?” Lassiter asked the kid. “What fun it’ll be to fetch splits of Rolling Rock for these Easy Rider fuckos. Pulling bitch position on the train.”

The kid said: “I fell.”

“You fell into something,” Lassiter agreed. “Enjoy life with these muffins, huh?”

The bikers just blinked slow, assigning Lassiter’s face to their mental Rolodex. In all likelihood Lassiter wouldn’t have been so bold if he hadn’t been hooped on diethyl ether. It wasn’t uncommon for him to swallow pills from the Ambu-Care kit or strap the Nitrox mask over his face. A few months ago I’d even found him dipping his finger into a pouch of Pethidine powder and sucking it off—the opium-eater’s version of Fun Dip. Eyes: two pissholes in the snow. “They should do something about these ants,” he’d said, waving a hand round his face. “Why would God, in his infinite wisdom, grant ants
wings
?” 

It was January. Flying ants aren’t native to northern New York state.

And now . . .
ether
. May as well chug laudanum, or get ballsed on Doctor Pennyfeather’s Wondrous Nerve Elixir. Lassiter’s gone all Cider House Rules on the shit lately. The janitors had been cleaning out the hospital basement when they came across a box of paper-thin glass ampules. The little fuckers were packed in
wood
: a solid block drilled full of holes. They looked like sniper’s bullets bedded in foam. They were supposed to be incinerated, but of course Lassiter cadged a whack of them.

Lassiter popped the glove box and pulled out an amp. He put it under his nose, held it in place with his upper lip. The sound of snapped glass: an ice cube fracturing in a cocktail glass.
Nice
. The air in front of the windshield went swimmy, like a stretch of desert highway.

“Ah, yes . . .” Lassiter rucked his shoulder blades into his seat, nestling in like a hamster into cedar shavings. “. . . there’s the flavor.”

The problem with ether is it seriously impairs an individual’s fine motor skills. Which is a problem when said individual may be called upon to manually intubate a toddler or inject full-spectrum psychotherapeutics into a carotid artery.

I parked at the Niagara Reservation. Through a gap in the pines the sun set over the Falls. Quivering spears of sunlight met the spume boiling off the cataract, a billion-trillion miniature suns tumbling over and over. The sun set tortuously slow.

When we were kids, Lassiter and me, we’d ride our Schwinns down into the basin, sneak through a flap snipped in the chainlink fence and fish for rock bass in the shadow of the Rainbow Bridge. We baited our hooks with maggots: they came packed in sawdust in a styrofoam cup, same as KFC gravy comes in. We’d cast our lines into water so cold it numbed our toes. We sat on the rocks in the gloaming with the monofilament wound round our finger to sense the slightest nibble. Our faces lit by that glittering disco ball of a city on the other side of the river.

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.