CONTINUED: Heart Attack

“We’ve been very chaste,” I said. “Except maybe for the time after that Elizabeth Taylor movie ….“

“I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

I was trying to provoke her, getting her to think the worst. Evidently I failed, because years later she told my future mother-in-law she wondered if I’d know what to do on my wedding night. But just now her mind was on the overnight trip and she turned her sights on her youngest.

Mom told young Michael to leave his Teddy Bear at home.

“No-o-o,” he screamed the wide eyed panic of a scared addict written across his face. The last time he left Teddy around the house unattended either Paul or I ... I honestly don’t remember who ... nailed it through the heart to the railing on the front porch along with a note saying, “You’re next.”

We were all kind of embarrassed by a seven year old having a Teddy Bear, but as Mom pointed out, “he’ll get over it in his own time.”

“An accident would be quicker,” said Paul.

Finally, a compromise was reached and Teddy was interred in an old round cookie tin Dad used in the cellar to hold his collection of screws and bolts. Michael promised to not remove the bear from what I suggested was Teddy’s casket. The ten inch round metal box was bound up with at least a half roll of shipping tape. Any attempt to unearth the bear would take long enough to be noticed. When Michael insisted a couple of air holes be punched in the top of the box, Dad refused but then relented.

The travelers climbed into the old Buick and Dad backed it out of the driveway. Mom sat in front with Dad and lit up a Chesterfield. Michael, looking forlorn, sat in back holding the tin box on his lap.

Paul turned to me as the Buick sputtered down the street. “If you step out of line even once, I’ll call Uncle Billy and he’ll get the county here to take you to the orphanage for the weekend.”

I snorted. “Wow, new friends. Get me in the girls dormitory, huh?” Billy was a cop and it would not be surprising to see a police car drive by a few times on the weekend. It was doubtful he would stop in unless he saw other emergency vehicles on the scene.

And so at precisely 1:41 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, June 20, 1959, Paul and I began life as the odd couple. I checked my watch one more time. On Monday I wanted to be able to tell my friends how many hours I had been left on my own. I wouldn’t mention the presence of my older brother, who in any case wasn’t watching me. He shut himself in our bedroom closet with a portable record player and his Bill Haley records. The player’s power cord snaked out from under the door to a nearby electrical outlet.

Twice I tipped the plug out of the socket momentarily and the record slowed down. From behind the door I heard him swear and punch the little player until I coughed and he realized what was happening. He chased me through the house and down the front stairs and part way down the street. But that was the only excitement all afternoon. The neighbors didn’t start hollering at us, so it turned out that all went well until after supper.

Around five o’clock Paul came out of the closet and made us a light supper. Except for well timed derisive comments, I let him accomplish his work. Although Paul had been assigned the cooking chores, he didn’t know how to cook any better than me, but he was considered more careful around fire. Specifically, I wasn’t allowed near the stove since curiosity got the better of me the month before and I heated up a D cell battery in one of Mom’s Revere Ware copper bottomed pots over an open flame. I did indeed employ a safety precaution by placing a lid on the pot. You could still see the round impression on the ceiling left by the lid when the battery blew up. The explosion made the neatest sound. Not a bang, but a sharp whoosh with a green flash of flame shooting up from the pot.

 When supper was over we sat back and finished up a dessert of candy and bananas. I noticed Paul massaging his chest.

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said and leaned forward hunching his shoulders. We hadn’t even begun to argue about who would wash or dry the two plates and two milk glasses.  

“You can’t have a heart attack,” I said. “You’re only sixteen.” But he really didn’t look so good. His face was pale and he wheezed with each breath.

“My chest hurts something awful,” he said.

 “It’s the peanut butter and fried baloney sandwiches you made us,” I said. “Topped off with the marshmallow chocolate cookies and the chicken corn candy for dessert. It’s called heartburn.”

“I don’t think so,” he moaned. “It really hurts.”

“Should I call Uncle Billy?” I said.

“Hell, no. Mom and Dad would never leave us alone again. Ever.”

I was getting concerned. “But if it’s a real heart attack, maybe we should—“

“Can’t you think of something? Remember the time you said toothpaste would work for Athlete’s Foot? Well, it did.”

“It did?”

“You made it up?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “It was based on my long experience in topical ointments.”

“You’re full of crap,” he said.

“Watch your tongue. I invented the use of ketchup for itchy scalp.”

“It worked?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen Mrs. Bletcher on my paper route since I recommended it to her. Seemed logical to me.”

“My chest really, really hurts,” he said and moaned again.

I racked my brain and finally an idea came.

 “Take the long wooden spoon Mom uses for spaghetti and stick it down your throat as far as it will go.”

“You mean, like a sword swallower?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Don’t swallow all of it. When it hits bottom, with just an inch or two sticking up out of your mouth, twist it around two or three times.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, it’ll mix up all the stomach acid with your food and that’ll take care of the heartburn.”

Paul sat there silent, his face a mask of pain.

“It might work,” I said, “if you don’t choke to death.”

He moaned again.

“Can you ride your bike?” I said.

“To where?

”The hospital. It’s only a mile or two over Pleasant Street. Maybe three.”

“I don’t think I can ride that far.”

“I’m sure it’s just heartburn,” I said.

He seemed to be getting worse as he pushed his knuckles back and forth over his chest. I had to think of a solution.

Another helpful thought came to me. “Where’s the Reader’s Digest Brain Surgery Manual?” That’s what we called the Home Health and First Aid book Mom kept on a bookshelf in the living room. I went and got it, brought it to the kitchen and thumbed through the heavy book waiting for my older brother to get over what I hoped was a bad case of heartburn.

“Here’s a diagnosis chart in the book,” I said. “Let’s go through it. Is the pain inside or outside the chest?”

“Inside.”

“Above or below the solar plexus?”

“What’s a solar plexus,” he said.

“If you don’t know what it is, you don’t have one. Left side or right side?”

“The middle.”

“Well,” I said, “the middle more to the right or the middle more to the left?”

“The middle of the middle.”

“Have you had this pain for over thirty days or less than ten days or –“

“I just got it, for cripe’s sake!”

“Have you participated in any strenuous activity in the past 24 hours? Lifted heavy objects or worked overtime?”

Paul ignored me.

“Does your skin possess a pallor or grayness?”

“I don’t know. Does it?”

“Just your hands from changing the bicycle tire this morning. Is there pain in your left arm?”

“I’m calling a cab,” said Paul.

On the phone he gave our address and asked how long it would take for a taxi to arrive. He said he needed to go to the hospital and volunteered he might be having a heart attack, but refused the suggestion to call an ambulance. “I’m only sixteen,” Paul told the dispatcher,” so I don’t think it’s bad enough for an ambulance.” Dad would have his own heart attack if he had to pay an ambulance bill.

The taxi cab arrived in fifteen minutes and pulled to the curb in front of the house. Mom and Dad and Michael pulled in the driveway seconds later as Paul and I were about to get in the cab. Gone only a few hours, they surprised us.

“You guys are certainly traveling in style,” said my father as he got out of our car and came over to the taxi. He didn’t look very well, his summer tan now rather peaked.

Paul began to whine. “My chest hurts something awful, Dad.”

“Paul’s having a heart attack,” I said.

Dad nodded and smiled. “No, he’s not. He’s got the flu.”

Mom walked over to us and Michael ran along behind her with his tin box. The tape was mostly off and trailed down like a ribbon..

“Your father has to go inside now and lie down,” Mom said.

“What’s the matter with him,” asked Paul.

“He has a bad case of the flu. It hit him just as we were leaving the city. We spent the afternoon in the hospital emergency room.”

“Thought I was having a heart attack,” Dad said. “You’re OK, Paul, you’ll have the heartburn for a little while longer, but it goes away when you start throwing up.”

“Thanks, Dad.” said Paul.”

“But that doesn’t last too long either,” said Dad. “When the chills and the muscle pains start, the vomiting is over.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Paul said again.

“Good thing, too,” said Dad, “because that’s when your other end cranks up.”

Paul was looking worse.

“I should go inside now, Dad.,” he said. “David will give you his blessing.”

“I think I’ll wait for his ordination,” said Dad.

Mom lit another Chesterfield. “I’ll have to call the family and tell them why we didn’t show up. Oh dear, they planned for us to stay overnight.”

Dad laughed. “They’ll forget all about us when they get the gin and whiskey out.”

Over the next few days all five of us came down with the symptoms. I told Michael we’d caught the flu from his Teddy Bear.

“Serves us right,” he said, “for stuffing him in a tin box with only two air holes.”

copyright David Griffin, 2014

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

29576

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Bathtub Bob

Bob learned to write news at the Associated Press office in New York City’s  Rockefeller Center, where with no education he got a job as a  typist just after World War II.  News leads and stories arrived  on the eighth floor of the  49^th Street building from all over the world.  Editors polished up the copy and passed it to Bob, who hunched over his keyboard and sent the stories  out on the teletype to newspapers and broadcast stations throughout the country.  Learning  his craft, he revised and rewrote and sometimes made up details on the fly.  Garnish, he called it. 

“A bit of garnish can save a story from the tyranny of facts,” he’d say.  “Or an incompetent  editor.”  Bob learned quickly, and it wasn’t long before the AP promoted him to an editor’s job.

In the late 1940’s, some of the more famous reporters would call in and speak as little as an idea to Bob and he would write it up under their byline.  Come Christmas time,  bottles of booze arrived at the AP for Bob from appreciative reporters in far-flung locations around the world.  He drank the booze up by New Years, and then bought more.  His  career sagged and finally collapsed. Bob eventually landed in Syracuse, and now sat across the bullpen from me, bathed in the red glow of a setting summer sun.  It warmed the colors in the newsroom, but cast a disconcerting finality over every inanimate object in the room, including Bob, who was just then snoozing at his desk.  Bob could be amusing to work with,  and he was a great teacher, but as the summer progressed, his mood deteriorated with each nip he took from the  bottle in the top right drawer of his desk.

Toward the end of my internship,  I often covered for him when he came up missing at the beginning of our shift.  Finally arriving, he often smelled of booze.   “Sat too long in the bathtub,” was all he ever offered as an excuse.

Bob evidently lived with a woman and thought the world of her.  Whether they were married or not, I didn’t know, because he seldom offered any details about her or their relationship.  So, one evening he made a comment that I found intriguing.

“If it weren’t for Julie,” he said, “I’d be drunk all the time.”  I wondered if he was ever sober, but I didn’t say so.

“How did you meet her?” I asked him.

“In a bathtub store.”

I looked doubtful.

“I wanted  to replace the faucet on my tub,” he said, “so I stopped at Miles Lumber company,  where there’s a bath department.”

I couldn’t imagine Bob playing plumber, but sitting in the tub for hours each morning, he sure was around plumbing a lot.

“It was the first time I saw Julie.  There she stood, behind the counter, framed by an upended bathtub behind  her, just like a Blessed Mother shrine in the  front yard.  The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, all warm and cuddly and red looking.”

“Red?” I asked.

“Yeah, her skin was red from the neon sign over the counter.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Well, it was rather erotic.”

“Uh huh.  What did the sign say?”

“I don’t know what the sign said, Dave. ‘Toilets’ or something.”

“OK, I see.”

I saw why the Great American Novel was taking so long to write..

 “The only girl worker  in the place,” he said.  “She could sell you a load of two-by-fours, but her real purpose was to wait on the well dressed ladies who came in to look at bath accessories.  You wouldn’t want Fat Frankie the plumbing guy to wait on the darlings, even if you could rip that smelly cigar from his teeth.”

Thoughtful marketing, I had to admit.

“She ignored me, looked right through me, like I was a ghost.  I wanted to look down and see if I was still all there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her.  But, you know me, Dave, I’m persistent.  I went back to the lumber yard almost every day.  I bought nails and paint brushes and angle brackets and tools and great piles of stuff I didn’t need, just so Julie would wait on me.  My kitchen cupboards were filling up with hardware, instead of food.  But she wouldn’t talk to me, except to tell me my  purchase total and to give me my change.  Every time she said “purchase,” her lips would pout and I’d almost swoon.  But  I was running out of cash.  Not to mention space in my cupboards.”

That’s when Bob decided to pass a note over the counter to Julie on his next visit.  

“I wanted to tell her I was interested, and to ask her out to dinner.  Everything would be riding on that note, so it had to be perfect.”

A writer always wants to get it perfect, and often thinks he has.

“I stayed up all night at the kitchen table with a pad of paper.  I’d write a short note, then ball it up and throw it on the floor.  It sounded as if I was walking through leaves when I’d get another sip of bourbon from the bottle on the counter.  Finally,  at five in the morning, I wrote it, the perfect note … my soul on paper.”

Bob stood up and folded his hands as if in prayer.  He  looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath..

“Roses are red.  Don’t talk to me, I’m dead.”

I looked for the hint of a smile on his face.  None.

“That’s it?” I said. “That’s what you came up with, after writing all night?  With your heart in the balance?   And the specter of a long, lonely life without the woman you loved?  Not to mention doing your own laundry forever?“

“Uh huh,” he replied.

“Why not, “rub a dub dub, let’s hop in the tub?”  I laughed.

“Gee, that would have been great, Dave.  Why didn’t I think of that!”

“Oh, I get it,” I said after a moment.  “You were trying to appeal to her sense of humor… or pity.”

“No, the note said what it needed to say.”

I thought I heard a little derision in his voice, as if I wouldn’t know good writing from bad.  I started to burn.

“Listen, Bob, if you expect me to believe that story, you’re crazy.  Or YOU were crazy when you wrote it.”

“No, “he said.  “Actually, I was drunk.”

“Well, that makes more sense,” I said.

“And I was still drunk a few hours later when I walked into the lumber yard and handed her the note.”

“And she still married you?”

“No, she called the cops and had me arrested.”

Now, I was confused.

“Well, you always talk about her, Bob.   I thought you married her.”

Bob came over to my desk and sat down on the side chair.  He gave out a little sigh.

“I guess I’ll have to explain the note to you.”

“I guess you will, Bob.”

He leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

“I know I look like a sane person to you, happy go lucky, without a care in the world,” he said.

“Not really, Bob, but you’re always entertaining.”

“A troubled person pulls someone to them with one hand and pushes them away with the other,” he said.  “I wanted Julie  and I didn’t want her at the same time. I knew the booze would have to go if she came into my life.  I sat down to write the note that evening,  because I wanted her badly.  But by five in the morning,  the booze was  pushing her away.   It was as if me and the bourbon were struggling against each other to write the note.”

Bob’s face looked like he was working hard to solve a problem.   The conversation turned serious, and  I felt awkward.

“You still drink, don’t you?” I said.

“For a while I didn’t.  I cleaned up my act.  I  won’t forget the afternoon I walked into the lumber yard and apologized to everyone … even Fat Frankie.  And Julie, of course.  Eventually she warmed to me.  Thank God!   I had 150 pounds of roofing nails piling up under the kitchen table.  We got married.  It was beautiful for a while, then it went sour.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. 

Bob looked looked down at his hands and then back up at me.

“She drank herself to death,” he said.  “She’s been gone two years now.”

Bob’s eyes were empty as he turned his head and stared off into space.  Then he squinted as though trying to see something in the far distance.

“I think I taught her how,” he said.  “To drink,  to kill herself.  She started boozing with me the second year we were married.  Surprise! Julie could really put away a lot of liquor. But it was like she got on a faster train than me.  By the time she was ten years out of the station,  so to speak, her insides were shot.  She was sick all the time  and then she was dead. 

I didn’t know what to say.  I could think of nothing  to offer, but I tried.

 “Your drinking won’t bring her back, Bob.  Maybe you could get some help from somewhere … a doctor or maybe a clinic or something.”

Bob stood up and walked back to his desk.  He sat and stared at his large cluttered blotter and scraps of note paper for a moment..

“Bob,” I said, “there are groups that can ….”

“Roses are red, “ he interrupted.  “Don’t talk to me.  I’m dead.”

And he meant it.

The fun went out of our banter that night, although Bob kept up the games and the  cracks for a time.  The air turned brittle,  however, and we were more careful with each other.  I was now privy to a secret that he probably hadn’t intended to share.   We no longer went out for a beer after work on Fridays,  I guess he  felt uncomfortable drinking with me, now that he’d opened the curtain on his misery for me to see. Bob began to show up at the newspaper later each day, when he came in at all.  The managers said nothing, and merely slid a substitute in behind his desk.  

When the summer ended, I returned to my classes at the University in town, disappointed to not have seen Bob during the entire last week of my assignment.  I wanted to say good bye, and I was holding out some small hope I might see him begin to improve instead of get worse.

It was a particularly snowy winter, with slush constantly in the street.  A foot or two of snow at a time would be dumped out of the central New York sky on a regular basis.   But spring came and with it my graduation.  I hung around the city for a while, trying to decide what I wanted to do next.  The Herald Post  called me for  fill-in work.  I took it, since I hadn’t landed a full time position.  They put me on the evening  shift again, with a magnanimous raise of seventy-five cents per hour.  I guess education pays.

Just as I settling in at my desk on the first night back,  Bob came bursting into  the bullpen.   He looked great, even healthy,  and I almost hugged him.  I was so glad to see him still alive.  Fit as a fiddle,  he had evidently mastered his circumstances and found his way back to a life.  The banter started all over again as we got down to work.  I wondered what person or agency or God was responsible for this miracle.

Halfway through the evening, he looked up to see me staring at him, smiling.

“Forget it,” he said, “You’re not my type.”

“What happened?” I asked. “I thought you’d be in a box underground by now.”

He leaned back in his creaking chair and thought a moment.

“Roses are red,” he said.

“What?”

He came over to my desk and sat down.

“I never cleaned out the closet after Julie’s funeral.”  he said.  “I don’t know, I couldn’t bring myself to throw her stuff out.  And I loved walking into the bedroom and smelling her scent, even though it tore my heart out.”

“Must have been in early September,  I rolled out of bed one morning feeling so hung over that for the first time in a hundred years, I prayed.  Not to God, but to Julie.  It was like shouting into the void, like calling out at the edge of the ocean, when you can’t see anything for miles.   I can’t explain the feeling, but I knew everything was over.  She wasn’t coming back and I wasn’t coming back.  That’s when I noticed her smell was gone.  Completely.  I went to the closet and opened the door.  I stepped in between her dresses and blouses and coats.  I sniffed and sniffed and I grabbed the jacket she wore most days and shoved my face into it.  I pulled it over my head.  I stood there and cried.”

Bob was animated.  Every muscle in his face worked to pull his features tight.  As he relived that moment in the closet, I became afraid he would break down and sob.

“A little gold case fell out on the floor,” he said.  “I picked it up and opened the tiny lid.  Inside, neatly

folded up, was a scrap of paper.   I unfolded and read it.

‘Roses are red.  Don’t talk to me, I’m dead.’ 

On the other side, she wrote, ‘I will love this man till my last breath.  And beyond,  if I can.’” 

“So what did you do then?”  I said.

“Attempted suicide,” he said, deadpan.  “I got in my tub and got ready to slit my wrists.”

“Holy shit!,” I said.  “You didn’t, did you?”

 “Nope.”

“What the hell saved you?”

“Me, I guess.   Or maybe a higher power.  I sat there with the water all around me,  and the tub brought back memories of the lumber yard.”

“And Julie?” I said.

“No, Fat Frankie.  That damned bastard would have laughed his ass off when he read my obituary.  I jumped out of the tub and called some people I know who’re in recovery.  I felt like an idiot, but I was scared to death.”

Bob got up and went back to his desk.  The chair  creaked as he sat down and laced his fingers behind his head, leaning back.. 

“You know, Dave, sometimes the elevator goes all the way to the bottom before it can come back up.”

“Sounds like it’s coming up,” I said.

“Yes, with a little help from my friends.”

Bob shot forward toward me and shouted across the desks, “Drunk almost slits  wrists in bathtub!  Give me the headline, Dave!”

“Dimwit Drunk Dunks Death!”

“That’s terrible, David!”

“Dim Bulb Sees The Light!” I tried again.

Bob laughed, a rolling belly laugh.

“Roses are red and he ain’t dead,” I shouted again.

“No, said Bob, “I ain’t dead yet.”

David Griffin                copyright 2008