A Shot Story by David Borkowski

Author:David Borkowski [Borkowski, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Educators, Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9780823278749
Google: dLciyQEACAAJ
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2017-09-05T04:07:36+00:00

7

It’s a Mad, Mad, Sad World

I share the ICU room with two other patients. The one next to me is old and shriveled. He’s skeletal, including his head, which looks like a skull on a cadaver. He reminds me of the Crypt Keeper. I’m thinking he’s suffered a massive coronary, after a protracted illness. He looks hideous. He’s never conscious the two days he’s here, although my peripheral vision is limited, so for all I know he may have opened his eyes a couple of times. I still can’t see much more than the ceiling and directly in front of me, my bed tilted upward at about a 45-degree angle. I’m immobilized. It’s like I never left the old woman’s lawn. Across from me, the bed aligned perpendicular to mine, is a mummy. He’s so wrapped in bandages I can’t tell how old he is. He was in a horrible car crash—multiple vehicles, gnarled metal, twisted bodies, flames, the works: a real Hollywood production. He’s more carefully monitored than I or the Keeper.

After being here for two days I can finally turn my head enough to see a glass-enclosed nurses’ station back toward my left. Sometimes two nurses sit there. One is present at all times. Before I could see it, I knew something elaborately medical existed behind me. I can hear the repetitious bleeps and irregular gulps of machines tracking our bodies, and once when a steady mechanical screeching woke me in the middle of the night a nurse rushed past me to take care of the old guy. The next day he dies. Periodically, the nurses come in to adjust the tubes jutting out of the Mummy. Far more tubes stick out of him than me. The Keeper has a lot too, but I can’t see him well enough to know who’s got more between the two of them. I count three attached to me: the IV fastened to my left wrist, the thin tube poking into my upper sternum, and the plumbing-sized tube inserted into the middle of my right ribcage. On the morning of the third day, the day before I’m moved from the ICU to a standard room, the doctor has to distract me when he pulls out the large side tube.

“So,” he begins, inching closer to the bed once he’s looked at my chart, “how are you this morning?” He has a foreign accent. I’m guessing eastern European. I tell him I’m fine. There’s a long pause.

Out of nowhere, he asks, “Tell me, what kind of girls do you like?”

“Girls?” I ask, unsure of where this is heading. There are two younger doctors with him and one of the nurses from the station. They look at me and smile.

“Yeah, girls,” he continues, now taking hold of the tube. “You know, what’s your variety, your type: blondes with big breasts—excuse me, nurse [she waves him off]—brunettes with long legs. Maybe you’re a man of the buttocks. You tell me.”

What the hell is a “man of the buttocks”? Is this guy for real? One of the other doctors laughs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.