NOW AVAILABLE — Marty’s new short story collection, When Paris Beckons

All My Goodbyes

Let me start by saying that morphine is really great stuff. Whew. I’m trying to focus.

I remember now. It was just a few days ago that I stared up at the ceiling tiles in my room at Methodist Hospital — “the best hospital in Brooklyn,” a young Bay Ridge guy, there with his sick mother-in-law and wife — said back in the ER, after I was admitted by my cautious local family practitioner.

My doc thought I was having a stroke because my left eye would not move. I knew I was fine, but hey, you hear stories. I thought it was nothing more than a little post-vacation inconvenience.

The Bay Ridge contingency shared the curtained area in the crowded, Friday night ER, so we heard them talking. The mother- in-law had a “tummy ache.” The old woman moaned incessantly, in Italian.

Well, it wasn’t a tummy ache, exactly. It turned out she had impacted bowels, which we found out because we heard three doctors bickering over which of them would have to manually evacuate the patient’s obstruction.

Hold on, just a second. Wow. I’m in a Keith Richards state of mind. This stuff is nice.

So, the nurse named Enron came by and asked me how the pain was. I mumbled, “It hurts.” I could barely talk, so I tried to make a sad face. It worked. He pushed a button on the I-V and I got more morphine.

Enron. I can see it on his badge, even now. Enron St. Pierre. I remember that I tried to make a joke about it, something remarkably witty, to bond with Enron, become one with him, in order to obtain another I-V squeeze of pain meds: “Hey, your name is Enron? Funny, my name is Worldcom. We have so much in common.” Enron smiled and tucked in my hospital gown, which had fallen off my shoulder. “I’ll be back,” he said.

“Ugggghhh,” I answered because my throat, my nose, and my face were killing me, and I gradually started to understand where I was, what had been going on. I had been intubated. Yeah, that was it. That was why my throat was as raw as the worst childhood sore throat after sledding in the slushy, dirty Bronx snow in a sweat- soaked John’s Bargain Store shirt.

I was intubated because last Friday night, after spending eight hours in the ER, mostly listening to a Bay Ridge guy’s mother-in-law wail, they found something in my head.

Let me clarify. Last Thursday I was on vacation in Montauk and woke up to find that I had double vision. For no apparent reason, I was cross-eyed. Spontaneous palsy of the sixth cranial nerve, the docs said. My left eye was frozen in place, all the way inward. It would not move outward. At all. Everything was double exposed, like back at college in the early seventies, driving after a night at the Blarney Stone and thirteen or so ninety-cent screwdrivers, inhaled while watching Sanford and Son reruns followed by the Knicks. This was back in the day, when the Knicks were, for a few years at least, the best team in basketball, and we put men on the moon, and the Mets had won a Series, and my friends were being sent off to Vietnam, and Hendrix wailed the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock one muddy morning, and political heroes were assassinated and we were waist deep in the big muddy, and the Smothers Brothers ruled network television and then, that December, Hells Angels were hired by the Stones for security at Altamont and all bloody hell broke loose. We sat at the Blarney Stone trying so hard, so hard, to focus, to motion to the bartender, Teddy, for one more, jes’ one more, us unable to see straight, him pouring ninety percent Georgi vodka and just a skimmer of OJ, and us wondering, as we watched Roger Grimsby and the Eyewitness News after the Knicks had won again, what were they thinking, just what were they thinking, when they committed more troops to ‘Nam, and that yes!—as Marv Alpert would say—it looked like we’d be next to go.

But we didn’t go. By some miracle, the call-ups started to slow by the time we’d graduated. I’d had dreams, every night, of slogging through a rice paddy, my M16 held overhead and being shot in the back, falling in the leech-infested water, falling, falling, my buddies urging me, “c’mon, c’mon, you can make it,” but I couldn’t and every night in the dream I didn’t, and I’d say, surprised, “I’m hit,” and blood would pour out of my mouth and I’d wake up in my room in a sweat and think about how my father faced death at age nineteen, every day, every day, for fifteen months, from the time he was sent from England, to Normandy, through France, into Belgium and, finally, Germany, surviving fire fights and the Battle of the Bulge, in the frozen forest of Belgium only to end up being sent back to Texas for re-training for the Pacific Theater, after all he went through in Europe, and then Truman dropped the big one and there was peace. Peaceful, nice and peaceful.

I used to play a game with my son at the beach when he was very little. I’d cover my arm, from the elbow to my fingers in the sand, right next to his chubby tan foot. “It was a beautiful day at the beach,” I’d say, slowly moving my fingers under the sand, to make it look like a tarantula arising. “Everything was perfect,” I‘d say. He’d giggle, uneasily, as my hand-tarantula broke through the sand. “Then, suddenly, tragedy struck.” At that, I’d scramble my hand over his foot and up his leg, as he squealed with laughter.

“Again,” he’d plead, reciting the words along with me. “IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY AT THE BEACH. EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT. THEN, SUDDENLY, TRAGEDY STRUCK.”