Utter Contempt

After this inauspicious start to adulthood, I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA, and spent the summer scrapping on a downtown high-rise construction site. Then I enrolled in community college for the fall and rented a room in a ratty old house off Highway 1. The other housemates were a female Asian grad student who was never there and a big, ruddy PG&E lineman from podunk inland named Brad, who had a blue heeler and a van, and spent all his free time up the coast, surfing. I was selling pot and had a pretty good book of business.

One of my customers was my dad’s paralegal. Her husband was a cop, but they’d been married too young and she was clearly checking out of the relationship. She’d recently had ginormous fake tits installed, and was not discriminating when it came to getting attention. One afternoon she dropped by for an eighth. We smoked and one thing led to another, but I came the moment she wrapped her fingers around my dick. With a disdainful flap of her hand she flung my load onto the carpet, gave me a look like, are you fucking serious?, and after that it was just business. She referred me a lot of customers though, and her best friend became a regular.

Dana was an ER nurse in her early thirties. She bought an eighth every few days, and would always hang around after and smoke me out. One day we were passing her little glass pipe back and forth and she goes, “Lacy says you have a big dick.” Well, that was that, and for a few months it was a pretty good deal. I knew she was fucking other guys, but I had no particular feelings for her and I always wore a condom. She even started referring me business from the hospital, and pretty soon I had a couple of doctors dropping by regularly. One of these guys, a squirrelly little Arab anesthesiologist, was also fucking Dana, and I used to invite him in to smoke with me, just to be cheeky and shame him with his bad habits.

This whole arrangement went south real fast. For one thing, I broke my right hand in a fight downtown and had to have surgery. After that I got a rather large prescription for Vicodin and my grades started dropping, worse than they already were from my everyday weed habit. Winter was coming, and finals week with it. Also Brad, the lineman whom I was subleasing from, was starting to get wise to my weed business and although he didn’t say anything at first, I could tell he didn’t like the customer traffic, which was considerable.

Meanwhile Max, my high school bestie, was getting further and deeper into hard drugs, living on the streets and hanging on the periphery of a local latchkey whiteboy gang that used to run heroin for bikers. Occasionally, one of the lower ranking members of this cohort would show up at my place trying to fence a stolen fixie or a laptop for a small amount of pot, and when I told them cash only they were not happy with me.

One night, Max showed up drunk with one of these colleagues, a vicious skinhead named Neal. It was late, and it was cold, and to refuse them a place to crash would’ve meant a definitive break from Max and this whole cohort. I let them into the front living room and put on a movie, but I was wary, and they started roasting me for it, passing a fifth of Ancient Age back and forth and cracking wise about what an uptight cunt I was. This recompense of my hospitality displeased me, and I decided I would prove them right. “Hey guys,” I said. “Come out on the front porch with me and have a smoke.” I handed them each a Camel and they followed me to the front. Then I locked the door behind us. They eyed each other.

It was drizzling. There was a big moist nasty old sofa on the front balcony, and we all sat down. As I lit their cigarettes I said, “Listen, guys. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” Max slouched where he sat, supremely entitled, took a long drag and exhaled it.

“You’re a miserable, arrogant little prick Sam. You need to relax,” he deadpanned. He wasn’t even trying to make it seem like teasing anymore.

“I don’t need to do shit. I said get the fuck out.”

“And what if I don’t?” he snarled. He thought I was bluffing.

I rose with a start, my eyes boring down into his, and said “Get the fuck up.” He stood straight up into my face and blew smoke. “What if I fucking don’t?” He was still calm, but this time he was louder. It was potentially now two against one, and I was intimidated and resentful of being regarded as a pushover. The moon glowed near full behind storm clouds to the west. The house was set into a steep hillside, with big eucalyptus trees towering up behind it almost touching the clammy grey sky, and it had an abnormally long staircase running from the front balcony down to the sidewalk. Max and I were face to face, nostrils flaring. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt. That was when I shoved him backwards down the staircase. Then I shot an icy glare over at Neal, unmitigatedly, zoologically prepared to immediately and severely injure him by any means necessary. Neal was too drunk and stunned by this whole turn of events to react. It was just he and I there on the balcony now, and he froze in place, avoiding my eyes and regarding the situation with a calm if mildly disturbed kind of moron’s perplexity.

Max tumbled backwards; flew, really, in an arc. His heels reconnected with the stairs about a third of the way from the bottom, his backside at a 45 degree angle to the street, at which point he fell straight back over the sidewalk, his head crashing into the mailbox, which flew off into the street in one direction as Max rolled to the other, veritably splattering onto his side with an eerie, semi-liquid thud against the pavement. The impact to his right shoulder had saved his head, possibly his life, and amazingly he was still conscious. As he got up he clutched the shoulder like something there might be broken. Then he started off ploddingly down the street with the slow caution of a newly walking toddler, muttering incoherently, clutching himself like a mental patient. Neal took a drag, stood up, and scampering down the stairs followed Max off into the night.

Around that time Dana had gotten exclusive with a neighbor of hers in the condo complex where she lived. I wasn’t particularly hurt by this, but the motivation to be available to her as a buddy and a sounding board was gone. One day while I was waiting to re-up and struggling through some homework I’d put off until I couldn’t really finish it, she blew up my little old school Nokia about a thousand times, leaving voicemails, trying to get a quarter ounce. I was irritated about my homework, irritated to not have weed, and it bothered me to be treated like a recalcitrant waiter, so finally I picked up and got very testy. In response to this, she drove up to my place an hour later with this guy, who followed her as she stormed up the balcony. Easy girls never want to accept that their opposite-sex friendships are all predicated on pussy, and as I opened the door to be confronted I noticed that the guy she was with was rather large. I guessed she’d finally found somebody with a bigger dick, and I did not appreciate the attempt at intimidation by security retinue. “Dana, what the fuck are you doing?” She glared at me, intensely hurt, and stormed back down to the car. Her other half just shrugged and followed her down the stairs.

The next afternoon, Brad came back from surfing up the coast and told me there’d been firetrucks and helicopters everywhere at Wilder Ranch because some girl had killed herself out there by jumping off a cliff. High school classmates I hadn’t heard from all year started calling, and it turned out the girl was a friend of mine. Kelly was this depressive and painfully shy poetess with big saucer-blue anime eyes. She was rail thin and small-chested with a cute overbite and wore her dark red hair in a bob. As freshmen and sophomores we’d hung out in the same cohort of AP-lit nerds and thespians, and all the guys had a crush on her. Apparently she’d gone off to some liberal arts college in Vermont and started hearing voices. Maybe it was the onset of schizophrenia, maybe something happened to her out in the north woods, or maybe both, but she’d decided on Christmas break to kill herself in Santa Carla. That was her assessment of adulthood, and it was valid.

Every tree has its own separate fall on the west coast, some change color sooner, some later. It was one of those blustery days in December when the stragglers all lose their leaves in one morning. The funeral was held in the big Episcopal church up by the UCSC campus, where I’d fingerpainted in the rec room as a kid. 

Everyone from my high school class was home on Christmas break. It was a grim reunion. The chapel had huge, stained-glass windows and rows of pews leading down a carpeted incline to the pulpit. The family sat in front—genteel liberals in cashmere and corduroy. Her dad was an old lawyer with close-cropped white hair, doughy and intensely mainstream in a way that’s hard to take seriously, but staid on that day. Our true core is off limits outside those rare blips on the calendar when everything shatters and cackles at you. That wasn’t true of his daughter. She saw through everything. I guess she even knew the price of eternal youth.

Kelly had the cutest lips when she was alive. It wasn’t that I had feelings for her after that first fall in high school. We never dated. But that syrupy little mouth was like seeing a turkey leg when you’re dying of starvation. I had to hand it to her—in suicide she took on an unattainability that was really hot.

To get from the chapel to the buffet we had to walk this gauntlet of folding display boards where the family hung up every piece of artwork Kelly ever produced. She was a very good artist. She used to draw these transmogrifying human figures, kind of like an R. Crumb cartoon, but with skinny people. She was extremely private, but when you’re dead you can’t stop your relatives from going through your things. The worst part about the way she went is that she never lived to see all that self-consciousness go numb.

After the funeral we all went to the woods to drink. This was a back-peddling concession on the part of those who’d always done better in school. It’s amazing how much distance an acceptance letter and nine months can put between people. Everyone was away at a four-year, going places, meeting new people, while I was still selling weed in Santa Carla, getting ready to drop out of community college.

After the funeral, Dana called me, apologizing for our spat and asking if I could sell her an ounce. This surprised me because I didn’t often sell that much at a time. We met at my place. She was a mess. Sweatpants, no makeup, pale, her eyes watery. She collapsed into me at the front door and started sobbing into my shoulder. I carried her to the couch. She started to tell how this guy, her neighbor, had gotten her pregnant, how she really loved him and thought he was the one, but when she told him she wanted to keep the baby, he disappeared. It was her day off; she’d spent the morning at Planned Parenthood. I didn’t know what to say. We smoked, I fed her, and she passed out on the couch. Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up and drove off. Someone told me later that she’d left town, but I never heard from her again.

Forward: Part III

Back: Part I

The first place I lived away from home was my father’s boat.

It was the summer of 2003, a week before my seventeenth birthday. Eddie was fifteen at the time, a formidable JV defensive tackle who was extremely socially awkward—in a very outgoing way, unfortunately—and basically had zero friends at school. I was in a punk band and when we weren’t practicing or playing out I spent most of my time around town on my skateboard, getting high and drunk at the beach, in parks or at friends’ houses. One Friday afternoon, Dad took us to lunch at a Chinese place off Highway 1 in Santa Carla and announced that he was leaving our mom.

Ever since Mom retired from running dad’s law practice three years prior she’d been a housewife. It wasn’t pretty. She had a lingering painkiller addiction from an orthopedic surgery, and basically spent all day getting high and drunk and cleaning the house to a sparkle. Their marriage had always been rocky. Now, if she and Dad interacted at all, it was either totally sterile and perfunctory, or a horrific fight. He started spending more and more time at the office. The last-straw knock-down drag-out happened out of town a week before the Chinese lunch. I hadn’t been home in all that time, and I didn’t want to go back, but I knew my mom was there alone.

For the next few months, on top of all the garden-variety agonies that go along with being seventeen, I became an emotional crutch for an increasingly embittered and scarily delusional fifty-year old woman. At one point she gave me a ride drunk—she drove drunk a lot, actually—and when we got home I made a comment about it, whereupon she completely broke from reality and violently attacked me, shrieking senselessly like a stuck pig, with beet-red eyes and foam gathering at the corners of her mouth. It became clear that in the moment she didn’t even know who I was; it was as if she had dementia. When I broke and ran, not wanting to hit her back, she hurled one of those big, wooden, high-backed domestic bar chairs at my head with impressive velocity. I swerved; it careened past me and shattered a wall-mirror in our inner hallway. The whole thing was like living in Grendel’s cave, but I felt I had no choice because otherwise no one would be there for my mom and she would drown in psychic torment.

That summer, Dad and Eddie stayed with my uncle, but before long, Dad bought a sailboat, rented a slip in the harbor and decided he was going to live on it. He wanted to sell the house though, and around Christmastime obtained a court order to have Mom thrown out. So while she was carpetbagging at friends’ houses pending a final disposition of the divorce, I had to stay on the boat.

Eddie and I had never been close, and he felt like I was encroaching on his space—which went without saying because, for one thing, it was a fucking boat. But also, he and Dad had really bonded over the sprucing up and maintenance of the place, and he felt very defensive of Dad, whom I was not getting along with at all. Dad had been the one who dumped Mom, and his newfound power to emotionally detach extended to me and my resentment of his self-centeredness. I was mad that he’d left me to clean up after him, and he’d been royally chickenshit to kick Mom out of the house at Christmas.

So I was snarky. As best I could, I stayed away for days and sometimes weeks, but while I was there I acted entitled and avoided doing chores, which especially pissed off Eddie. One day while Dad was out we got into it. I was always the verbal contortionist of the family and to this day I can be very frustrating to argue with. Things just ratcheted up and pretty soon Eddie stormed down into the hull where Dad’s room was. I heard him rack the slide on the .45 and he stormed back up the deck and brandished it right in my face. It was late on a clear, windy March afternoon in northern California. The air was crisp, and in my peripheral vision the tide was rising against the south jetty.

I could see Eddie’s finger to the side of the trigger guard and I was betting the safety was on. He was infuriated, but he didn’t know what he was doing, and I quickly disarmed him and pistol-whipped him hard, so hard I immediately jumped back, shaking from shame and remorse. He dropped into a corner on one knee and looked up at me with huge, watery eyes, his cheek slashed open and bleeding badly. I removed the magazine, threw it in the water, and de-chambered the round. Then I dropped the gun, grabbed my skateboard and left, and never came back. Aside from a handful of shouting matches off to the side of weddings and funerals, after that my brother and I didn’t have a substantive interaction for over a decade.

(Part II here…)

The year after college I was an ambulance EMT. I started in July, and it wasn’t until September that I was assigned a steady shift with a partner. Before that I just bounced around between paramedics, snoozing, reading, and writing this blog on my cellphone between inventory and 911 calls.

My first code blue was an OD, on my first day of work. We arrived on scene before fire to find a supine fat kid unresponsive on a back driveway, with a gaggle of bleary-eyed teenagers who’d obviously waited too long to call, and were real quiet and vague about what happened to their friend.

I attached the EKG nodes and started bagging while my paramedic trainer pounded on his chest. No cardio activity. Fire arrived and they started banging on his chest in a rotation. Still no activity. Then someone offered to bag while I pumped, and I went to town so hard on this kid that I cracked his sternum. The snapping sound was horrific, but the moment it happened the heart monitor gave a beep and started going.

The thing about it was, everything happened in under ten minutes, and although he died later that day, when we dropped him in the ER the kid was still alive—unconscious and intubated, but alive. It wasn’t until November that year that I actually witnessed a death.

Now, I’m an omega, a contrarian loner who hates rules and rarely strikes up a lasting friendship. I’m also fairly tall and large-framed, but my first paramedic partner, Tommy Gonzales, was a medic second lieutenant in the National Guard, the kind of beta-simp who joins the service to compensate. He looked like Eugene Levy—gaunt, about 5’6″, and very uptight, but highly intelligent, which necessitated bending the rules as often as they got in the way of logic. I respected him for that.

One night just about dusk as I was driving Tommy around the Sonic drive-thru, we got coded to a trailer park. Again, we got there before fire. Again, the patient was supine, this time on a shabby carpet. It was a double-wide with fake wood paneling and a bunch of taxidermied elk heads on the walls. The guy must’ve been in his mid-sixties. He was shirtless and barefoot in a pair of jeans that hadn’t been washed in a coon’s age, skinny-fat like alcoholics often are, and covered in a half-inch layer of wooly grey body hair that went all the way up his neck to an untrimmed beard. The place was strewn with empty pint bottles and crushed-up Coors cans.

The family was all assembled—son, daughter, daughter-in-law, adult grandkid. They said they’d found him the way he appeared, unresponsive, not breathing. They thought he’d choked on a turkey sandwich he’d been eating lying down, and that he must’ve rolled off the couch onto the floor. That was what it looked like. I had to shave him to place the EKG nodes, then Tommy and I started doing our thing.

It was a long night. The monitor gave just enough activity after a minute of CPR that we had to keep going even though the guy’s chances were very slim. Fire got on scene and Tommy started trying to intubate, but the laryngoscope kept bringing up turkey sandwich. The firefighters and I rotated doing CPR while Tommy smeared gob after gob of partly digested food like pâté onto the inner lining of a red haz bag. Eventually we got the guy tubed. His cardio kept flopping and starting back up with just enough activity for hope.

At one point I stood up to stretch my legs. Across the room, the family was piled around a card table in the corner, faces downcast, their arms draped around one another, watching their patriarch recede into eternity past indifferent, knee-jerk bureaucracy—past us, with two forms of state-issued ID over his eyes. We were the boatmen.

Above the family on the wall was a framed and faded portrait of a proud and fearsome Marine with a flag half-draped across the background. That was the guy we were trying to save. The two of them couldn’t have looked more different. He wasn’t in his body anyway, yet he might not’ve been further away than that portrait. I felt this sudden sense of reverent foreboding in the pit of my stomach, that this man lying dead at my feet was witnessing his family’s despair, and screaming desperately from just out of reach of them.

After three hours, Tommy advised the family that things weren’t going to turn around. They nodded stoically. We called up to the hospital and signed the necessary forms. Then we packed up our equipment in haz bags and debriefed with the firefighters before leaving them to wait for the coroner.

That shift went long. We went back to base, cleaned up, and tried to get a nap, but the calls just kept coming. The 24-hour shift that had begun just before that code in the Sonic drive-thru turned into 35, 36, then 40, and topped out at 51.

At one point we dropped someone at the ER. It was about 9 in the morning. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the ambulance waiting for Tommy to snag Graham crackers and juice boxes from inside at the nurse’s station, when all of a sudden I started sobbing maniacally, just huge choking sobs without any kind of buildup or anticipation whatsoever. It was so primal. There was no reflection, no social pressure (I was completely alone) and no reason to feel anything. I hadn’t known the guy, the Marine—I hadn’t known him. I’d run plenty of codes, seen lots of pitiable people in sorry states and felt bad for them, and I’d gone hours by then without it occurring to me that I’d been impacted at all. It was just a job, I was just exhausted, I just wanted to go home to my family, I just wanted a burrito. This is America—nobody has real feelings. I remember that I’ve had them, back when I was a kid, but I don’t even remember what real feelings feel like. It’s been six years since that 911 call and in all that time I haven’t experienced a comparably spontaneous and authentic emotion. And yet it happened, in spite of every social pressure militating against it.

It’s strange how things incubate in us when we thought they didn’t matter, or that we’d forgotten them. Sometimes when I discipline our kids, my wife gets on me and says, “This isn’t the army, you know!” On the one hand, when I hear this it sounds odd, because the army is the furthest thing from my memory and my motivations. On the other hand, my first reaction is to feel she’s being unreasonable, because life is rough, and it’s better they learn it first from their dad. But what she sees me doing that I can’t see myself is sublimating an experience that’s constantly with me in ways I’m almost never aware of, forgotten humiliations and death by a thousand cuts, and spinning the wheels of borrowed time.