THERE SHOULD BE ZEROES
We were working on the little reach-in sandwich prep. I’d called him when he was halfway home and
asked if he could come help me because I was too tired (depressed) to work
alone. I was grumping at him now &
then, as usual, when he got kind of bull headed about putting things together
too fast & furious, like he’d done for years, but we got along. Then all of a sudden he said,
I feel dizzy.
But he wasn’t articulating enough that I could understand
him.
You’re busy? You
don’t want to work with me anymore?
No I feel dizzy. I
need your help.
He looked at me like a child, thinking a grownup could move
mountains and reverse the course of rivers.
How can I help you?
I need to sit down.
Can you take me over to the tables.
He put his hand in my arm and I led him over to the
upholstered benches he’d made himself in this restaurant he’d built
himself. He took his bridge out and laid
down in the booth. A little later he
rose up enough to look at me and say,
Today was a very ugly day.
Why?
I don’t know. I
couldn’t do anything right.
I knew he had a tumor, just above the ear where he puts his
cell phone. I’d heard of other
cases. But they’re just anecdotes. Let’s wait until a few thousand people die
and before we do something. I said,
I think we’re wasting precious minutes. You need to go to the emergency room. I’m calling an ambulance.
No, that will cost too much money.
I’ll drive you there in your car then. What hospital do you want to go to?
I don’t know the name....the one my doctor works out of....
Where is it? What are
the cross streets?
Grand....(again he couldn’t articulate, he was trying to say
Grant)
I don’t know any such street...here let me draw you a
map....
It’s on Stone.
Stone and what?
His hand moved over the lines I drew on a card....he
couldn’t recognize anything about the city he’d been in for thirty years.
OK I’m taking you to the ER at UMC. If you remember where your hospital is we’ll
go there if you don’t we’re going to University
Medical Center
He looked even more like a scared, confused child. He went into the back where we’d been working,
just to get some little thing or go to the restroom, I thought, but he was
taking too long so I went back to check on him and he was putting stuff away
and pushing the reach-in back into its hole in the wall as if he was perfectly
healthy.
Come on let’s go, I can do that later.
And after this display of sudden strength I had to help him
into his car.
Do you know how to drive this car?
Of course.
Turns out I didn’t know where the emergency flashers were
& instead pushed the button to open the trunk while I was trying to look
back through the rear view mirror. I
kept thinking,
This is too mundane, this isn’t real. There should be Zeroes on my tail, there
should be MIGs, I should be going low, to get under them, doing barrel rolls
and end to end flips and hitting them with fifty caliber machine gun rounds, ka
chaka chaka chaka chaka BOOM! I should be radioing in my kills, and dive
bombing down into the smokestack of a carrier and watching the engine room
explode.....I should ask for a police escort to the hospital and at least make a
little noise, but they won’t get here
until it’s too late and all that racing and jarring would just make his
condition worse probably....
But there should be Zeroes......well maybe they’re
here.
I was sorry I’d been so grumpy with him all these
years. Telling him,
Fuck that other restaurant (abandoned up in the foothills),
fuck your big ass ideas about turning the restaurant into condos and destroying
the land, come on, let’s turn the café’ you’ve still got into a sculpture
garden with big old trees over live ponds and sculptures and kinetic sculptures
people can sit and eat in....we’ll get a
grant, come on, you think I want to do this boring grinding crap the rest of my
life, give me a little hope, I can’t work without hope....
And he’d laugh like I was crazy and amusing, but lately he
was actually coming around, agreed to draw some blue prints for the project....he
could do that, better than a lot of architects and then this had to
happen....now there’s nobody even there to grump at. John Muir said, “In wilderness is the
salvation of the world”. We don’t get to wilderness by building condos in it,
we get there by recognizing the need for a respectful distance between it and
our miserable species....which I’ve been watching for years and still can’t
crack the code. .
He vomited on the way in to the hospital, and the rasta guy
in the weird haircut with shaved temples and a pony tail shoved a tray in his
lap. I noticed they had a dozen trays
just like it stacked up behind the desk.
We got to an examination room and his wife suddenly appeared behind me,
finally, someone who knew how to handle this guy. But did she? He’d used all their money on
schizophrenic dreams and schemes. One
day he’d be telling me he’d traveled all over the world, knew seven languages, had
grown his huge garden, played his music, seen his children grow up, didn’t need
anything else, wanted to give something back, and the next day he was going to
make millions building condos. Meanwhile
I was feeling Schizophrenic too. I
needed his constant optimism but it drove me crazy because it seemed to be
about nothing.
Big shots,
I said, driving his used up old Mercury out of the parking
lot, and wanting to ram every car in it,
Big shots, they can all just go fuck themselves.
And out on the road I was especially attracted to cop
cars, anything with those beautiful red and blue and white flashing lights, sudden strange vectors of vehicles crashing into each other, sweet oblivions that
you could crawl into out of the same old same old daily grind that was killing
you worse than any sudden death ever could.
Brains,
I said,
Brains, I was thinking, back at the restaurant, cleaning up
the mess, putting the tools away. And
then I just sat in one of the empty booths, looking at the picture on the wall of
a sweet little kid holding a dog. The
kind of thing he’d chosen to fit the theme of Old Times Restaurant. It made me sick. How was that part of this reality? It just was. Part of that tumor with cells going nuts,
making blood supply lines, sloppily, randomly, like a developer on
steroids. Maybe those vessels burst,
maybe it was just the tumor pressing on the arteries or the brains
themselves. Brains, I thought, because just that morning I’d been listening
to a naturalist on NPR talking about the wonder of insect brains, so, what
about human brains....
HUMAN brains? Hey,
wait! Is this some kind of joke?
