Bad Call by Mike Scardino

Author:Mike Scardino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Spare Change

I feel terrific today, thanks to the wonders of modern pharmacology. Last night I discovered I had about a half-dozen pills remaining in a bottle of Dexamyl left over from senior year in high school. This morning I took one, and I feel wonderful. Energetic. Upbeat. Ready to roll. I wish I could feel this way all the time, especially working on the ambulance.

I started taking Dexamyl to lose weight. Dad grew up best pals with a pharmacist in Elmhurst who gets him basically anything he wants. I remember Mom massaging our gums when we had toothaches, with paregoric from an unmarked brown quart bottle, obtained courtesy of Barry the druggist. Pure tincture of opium, just sitting in a kitchen cabinet alongside the baking soda.

Dad asked Barry for some diet pills for me, and Barry responded with a huge bottle of time-release Dexamyl capsules. It wasn’t considered a big deal, just a normal good-buddy quid pro quo. Dad kept Barry’s Caddy running like a top. Barry kept me running like Jesse Owens.

The effects were astonishing. I got the best grades of my life with little apparent (at least to me) effort. I was performing feats of gymnastics I would never have dreamed possible. I was sprinting on the track like an Olympic hopeful. My weight was holding at one hundred forty. Now, it’s well over two hundred. Maybe I should think about getting a refill.

Eddie and I have a call, a woman down, on the sidewalk on Roosevelt Avenue. Okay, let’s go. Happy to take the call. Happy about everything today. Happy, happy, happy. I wonder if Eddie is thinking something’s wrong with me. Maybe he thinks I’ve had a little too much coffee. No point telling him I’ve downed a Barry’s Little Helper.

At the scene, there are two policemen and a woman about sixty-five or seventy. She’s sitting on the curb, with her legs and feet in the street. Her head is bowed down, and her hands are resting at her sides, palms up, on the sidewalk.

She looks utterly exhausted. Vanquished.

As usual, pedestrians are passing us by as if this were perfectly normal. It’s about noon, bright and sunny and not too hot. Nothing seems at all out of the ordinary except for this defeated woman, sitting half in the street.

There doesn’t seem to be a thing physically wrong with her. She’s a little confused and obviously very sad. Her face is wet with tears, and she has a hurt and startled expression in her eyes. I’m beginning to feel like the Dexamyl I took may have gone stale, sitting in my drawer at home. I’m starting to feel awful. This isn’t supposed to happen. Neither was whatever happened to this poor woman.

It’s difficult to get her to talk. When she does, she tells us a story that is probably pretty common; you just normally don’t see the effects firsthand.

She says she’s been put out of the house, out on the street, by her daughter and son-in-law. Just forced from the home she shared with them.

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