LITMIR.BIZ

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My scream was becoming hoarse.

      “Beautiful, baby.” Lonnie decided he had waited long enough for my answer. “If you’ve got any questions let me know. All right? All right? Great, baby. Ciao!”

      “Aaaaaah!” I replied, but the line went dead mid-scream.

      The scream ebbed and I fell silent. The phone slipped from my fingers. I looked up at the man and the woman trying to help me.

      “It’ll be all right,” the man said.

      “Aaaaaah!” I answered.

      Not my most articulate series of conversations, but I did the best with what was at (skinless) hand.

      Convalescence

      My ambulance ride to the hospital is a subject for someone else’s book. Perhaps Vince and Janice D’Agostino, the retired couple who found me in the grocery store parking lot and summoned the ambulance. Janice held my good hand while the EMT injected me with some sort of industrial-strength opiate. I don’t remember much of anything after that.

      The next few hours passed in a similar chemical haze, although I do retain brief flashes of memory. I was visited by several nurses and doctors. I came to know most of these people quite well over the coming days of surgeries and recoveries, but there were two doctors I considered “my doctors.”

      Doctor Gerber was an elderly man with a lipless ribbon of a mouth. It was the sort of slack and inarticulate aperture that might have seemed at home on a snail or slug. It was adapted perfectly for suctioning up a meal of debris off the side of a gourd.

      Doctor Gerber would walk into my hospital room, peer over the rim of his glasses at my chart, glance up and at a point about three feet above my head on the wall, and then walk out. The closest I ever came to having a conversation with Doctor Gerber was a bit of fleeting eye contact and a grunt as he replaced the chart at the foot of the bed.

      Doctor Lian was the brusque Chinese doctor who I interacted with the most. He was the one who told me Doctor Gerber was the surgeon who would ultimately repair my hand. Doctor Lian was some sort of weird bone specialist whose job it was to inflict intolerable agony on me daily by drilling a series of screws into my fingers.

      “You such a baby,” he complained whenever his drill churned through the local anesthetic and I twitched or gasped in pain. “A baby not even wake up if I do this. Just a tickle.”

      It took two days of drilling and screwing and steel-plating to assemble the bones in my fingers. When Doctor Lian was done, my hand was covered with scaffolding. Painful scaffolding that wept blood and managed to ache through the morphine.

      The Erector Set on my hand wasn’t even addressing the problem of not having any skin. There was a gelatin-like mitten over my hand. A nurse explained it was “keeping me fresh” and preventing serious infections.

      I had completely forgotten about my ill-timed phone conversation with Lonnie, but that small mercy was not going to last. The pleasant opiate haze began to dissipate when Doctor Gerber ordered a reduction in my painkillers. The physical pain was bad, but the boredom was worse. When you’re drugged out of your mind you never realize how boring it is to sit in a hospital all day.

      My roommate, a literal rodeo clown with a broken pelvis, dominated the room’s only TV and loved to yell answers at bad game shows. Buddy Bronc was his clown name; his real name was something boring like John Cooper or James Cobbler.

      Buddy said he was “kicked in the taint by an ornery ‘spinner’” and was “just glad to have a dick.” He always wanted to talk to me about rodeos and having sex, which demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify subjects I never wanted to discuss with a clown.

      Just before I arrived, an exceptionally massive nurse had made Buddy intimate with a Foley catheter. He wanted to discuss this inconvenience at length. The pain it caused him was the only thing that could cut through his sex and rodeos talk.

      Have you ever read about the candiru fish? It’s a tiny silver fish in the Amazon that can follow a wading fisherman’s urine up his urethra. Once it’s nestled snugly inside the unlucky fisherman’s urinary tract, it latches on with barbs surrounding its mouth and drinks his blood.

      The candiru drinks blood from the inside of the fisherman’s dick. The fish is in his dick. Imagine a version of the candiru you can purchase from a medical supply catalog. That’s a Foley catheter.

      “Goddamn you piss a lot,” Buddy moaned whenever I stepped out of the bathroom. “Keep me up all fuckin’ hours.”

      He was understandably bitter about my urination habits. While I was able to get out of bed and take a leak at night, the severity of Buddy’s injuries forced him to turn over that body function to a vampire fish wedged up his urethra.

      Sometimes Buddy even managed to combine his urination obsession with one of his favorite subjects.

      “Y’all ever peed on a girl?” Buddy asked me late on the third night of my hospital stay.

      I confessed that I had not urinated on a woman and voiced no interest in doing so.

      “You should try it. You got to drink a whole lot and then save it up. So you pee more and harder.”

      I was willing to take his word for it.

      “Sheila left me last week,” Buddy Bronc confided to me during a commercial break. “She took the dogs and all my DVDs.”

      “Was it the peeing?” I asked.

      “That’s my wife you are talkin’ about there,” Buddy snapped.

      I apologized and Buddy seemed to accept.

      “It’s okay. I ain’t never peed on her. Sheila left me ’cause I was still married to Rita. So me and Sheila’s marriage didn’t count. And I said, ‘Well, I got the license from Reggie work up at the courthouse.’ But I think she just wanted to pick a fight…”

      Buddy was a terrible clown. While he digressed into a monologue about his girl Sheila, his “fat bitch” sister, and his previous wife, my mind focused in on the pulsing pain in my hand. It felt as if someone was taking a drag on a very evil cigarette and the burning ember at the tip was buried inside each of my shattered finger bones. I became hypnotized by the rhythm of the pain and almost drifted off to sleep when something Buddy was saying snapped me back to consciousness.

      “…give her a call tomorrow. I think I need to have a conversation with that bitch.”

      Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Lonnie Saunders called me! He called me about a book!

      The realization washed over me in a wanna-puke tsunami. Lonnie Saunders wanted me to write a book! Lonnie, the unctuous chimera of a used-car salesman, sports agent, and pimp, wanted me to write some sort of godforsaken guide.

      Guide to what? What was it? Fuck! Something about wizards?

      “Fuck!” I exclaimed aloud.

      Buddy looked over at me.

      “Which one? Rita? Been at least six weeks. Now Sheila, we used to…”

      I hit the nurse’s CALL button beside my bed as Buddy began to describe a sex act he performed on his fake wife that began with lassoing her in a barn. It ended with dire hillbilly deviance I dare not recount here without risking the confiscation of this book from libraries.

      The door to the room opened and the night nurse stood silhouetted in the doorway. Neither busty nor Asian, I would generously describe Mandy as “structurally sound.” She was short and stout, with legs as thick as rail ties. She filled a Technicolor nurse’s smock with a confused bust that seemed to expand in several directions at once. No looker, true, but I was glad it was Mandy.

      The other nurse, an Ecuadorian girl who was beautiful except for her bad teeth, was a sadist. I once asked for an extra pillow to prop myself up better and she looked me in the eye and pinched my arm. I don’t even know if she spoke English. She never even brought me the

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