I rested my head carefully on Kevin’s shoulder so that I wouldn’t concoct any unnecessary pain. Which reminded me, he hadn’t yet noticed that I was bleeding. I decided that I would slip it to him somehow.
“Crying?” I started, “are you sure?”
Kevin held me out an arm’s length away from him and stared me straight in the eye. He gave me that oh-so-familiar look with his head to an angle at one side. It was clear then how he and Brian were related. They displayed the same judging expression when they weren’t sure whether or not they were being bullshitted.
“Yes…” he said finally, letting go of my shoulders. “Whassa matter? Did your joke fail that terribly?”
“Joke?” I was genuinely confused.
“Ya, you know, the fake blood.” He said it as if it were the most common thing to say.
“God Kevin, it’s not fake,” I told him slowly. It was getting harder to talk now that my brain was throbbing. Talk about crying wolf, all those years of practical jokes are really catching up to me.
He had a good laugh about that one for a while and didn’t really stop until he saw my serious expression. I wasn’t a great liar, but he isn’t exactly the greatest in pinpointing a lie. When “Eat this” sounds like a bundle of giggles instead of a bunch of words, Kevin will fall for even that every time. I knew I should have given him the fish gum when I had the chance. But my joking days are way over, except for the odd insult or comeback.
Kevin composed himself and I looked away. I could feel warm tears cascading down my cheeks again, but I couldn’t stop them. So this is what he thinks of me, I kept thinking, I’m one big joke. Kevin didn’t see those tears this time and I was thankful. I made a mental note to see a doctor about my embarrassing crying problem, but I never really got down to it. In fact, I think I figured out for myself what was wrong with me.
I took my bloodstained palm and smacked the side of Kevin’s face with it lightly, hoping that some of the blood would rub off onto him, but by then it was dry. Kevin mistook this as play fighting (OK, so we’re big kids now, what’s your point?) and was quick to smack me upside the head. I was still for a moment and so was Kevin. The amount of incredible pain I was in hadn’t registered (it takes approximately five seconds for any type of information to register into my brain) and Kevin was trying to get over the fact that the liquid dripping from his fingers was my blood. He had on the same expression as Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” The part where she opens the trunk and there’s a dead body inside, mostly. Except his face was frozen in the position and he wasn’t just acting. We stood absolutely still for a while, then simultaneously we both screamed. My scream was louder and shriller than Kevin’s was because fear screams and pain screams sound differently.
Pretty soon we had developed a large crowd all around us. After a while, the paramedics (who were always nearby since we’ve had so many accidents) helped me onto a stretcher, which I really didn’t need and carried me off to get bandaged. They took Kevin along too, because they thought that the blood on his hand was his. When Kevin tried explaining where the blood really came from, they didn’t believe him because he was just as stubborn when he had to be hospitalized for appendicitis.
When the paramedics finished strapping us up all nice and tight, the crowd separated like the parting of the Red Sea. They didn’t need any sirens to know that if they didn’t move out of the way right away, they would be fired.
While the doctors were wrapping up my head, I watched the young female doctor carefully clean off Kevin’s “wound.” She looked so comical, peeking at Kevin’s unscathed hand looking for any kind of cut and not finding anything. Kevin tried explaining to her again that there was nothing, but she shushed him and gave him a long speech about how she knew what she was doing, even so she was so young. After a while, she gave up and motioned for the experienced doctor in the room (by that I mean gray hairs, wrinkles, the works) to come and help her.
“There’s nothing here,” he informed her flatly.
“But there was so much blood, I don’t understand.”
“Maybe this young man was trying to make a pass at you.” Kevin was tracing their conversation back and forth with eyes. When the geezer doctor suggested that, our eyes met and we both burst out laughing.
The doctors took their precious time doctoring and cleaning the wound. It was a stainless steel pan, but even so some pieces of it got caught up in my scalp. They doped me up with painkillers and I waited patiently for an hour and a half without the assistance of a Gameboy. Kevin was rounding up the guys for the meeting of the damned. Every time somebody in our ‘Street Family gets injured we always have a meeting of some sort. This way I wouldn’t be stuck repeating my story over and over. Chances are that the whole staff that works for us would know by tomorrow anyway, so really there was no use.
When the wrapping was completed, I wasn’t in such a great mood. I just wanted everyone to stop cooing over me. ‘They should be angry, I thought, I granted them a curfew. AJ’s going to really feel it later on when he can’t go clubbing.’ Thanks to me, a curfew was proposed in case my attacker decided to come back and “finish the job,” as quoted by Mr. Policeman. Surprisingly, the guys didn’t really mind staying out until 8:00pm with a guard watching their every move. I think they were all scared of the possibility.
But in my case, it didn’t really matter, because after they had me all bandaged up; I went straight back to my bunk on the tour bus. Kevin knew enough not to follow me. I guess Brian spilled the beans about some of our conversations.
A moment and a few stares later, I was back on the bus. With all of the windows and doors locked, I began to feel better. I found my way to the bathroom and promptly threw up on the toilet. Or on the toilet seat, rather. At first I didn’t really want to clean it because it stank and I had a headache, but it was mine and I did so. When I finished cleaning it, I sat down by the toilet and closed my eyes. 3:00 shifted to 6:00 in almost an instant. And I managed to throw up beside the toilet again.
A doctor, who had been called especially away from the hospital to serve me, knocked on the door before I had time to finish cleaning. I didn’t know who it was calling my name and banging on the door, so I decided to ignore it for a while. But my headache and nausea increased with each knock, so in the end I had no choice.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses, I’m coming,” I shouted at the persistent knocker. God, it hurt to shout. The burglar may have spared my life, but did he have to injure it first? I was sure that the blow to my head had already cost me five minutes from my life.
Grudgingly I stood up. I did this too quickly and I nearly sent myself tumbling into a spot of puke that I had missed.
Screw it, I thought, I’m not being down again.
When I finally opened the door, the doctor stepped inside and made himself comfortable. Meanwhile, I struggled and strained to get over to where he was sitting. Before I passed out, the doctor caught me by the armpits and dragged me over to the bed.
As he unraveled my soaking bandages and replaced them with fresher ones, he talked on and on about stuff I could care less about. About his wife and kids, their wonderful report cards – everything. This guy was really starting to get under my skin and I couldn’t wait until he finished. I would have commented in between breaths, but this guy didn’t even need to breathe it seemed. He just went on and on as if I wasn’t there at all. I wondered how his wife and patients could put up with a guy as annoying as him.
When it was finally all over he asked me, “Is there anything else I can do for you before I go?”
Quickly and eagerly I waved my hands and shook my head no. It was a little bit too eagerly though, and I almost fainted again. The doctor saw this coming and laid my head down on the bed. With my feet on the floor and my head on the bunk, I started feeling better. The guy had a big mouth, but he already saved my consciousness twice. Still, he was paid to do what he did, and I didn’t feel badly about what I thought.
“Careful, careful,” he cautioned me, waving his index finger. Watching it move back and forth was starting to provoke the sleeping nausea within me.
When I felt like I could walk (well, I still didn’t really feel well enough to walk, it was just this doctor at my bedside was driving me nuts again) I saw him out the door. I thought it would be all over and he’d never bug me again, but just then he reached behind me and gave my derriere a hearty smack. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe it was some sort of a ritual in his country (America?) or maybe he watched one too many football games (he hated sports, he told me). I put two and two together and came up with the conclusion that he was gay. Before I could open my beak and shout back at him “I’m not gay!” I realized that he was gone.
I went back to the bathroom and this time I threw up into the toilet. Alternatively, I threw up and cried. After what seemed like an eternity, I crawled out of the la toilette and headed for the kitchen. There, I flopped down beside the pantry and crammed as many Twinkies into my mouth as I could muster. As I ate, I thought about everything. I zoned out while I was eating and so I couldn’t feel the tightness forming in my belly from it being stretched to maximum capacity. At one point, I completely forgot that I was still eating; yet I had programmed myself to continue shoveling food into my mouth to the point of absolute pain. Sometimes I felt like I was drowning because my mouth was full of something I couldn’t breathe through and my stomach was full beyond its natural capacity. That usually would scare me right out of my fantasies.
The problem with keeping me on a tour bus is that there is always an abundant supply of food. If you run out of food in one place, you can just go to another. There’s so much food that we really don’t need to visit McDonalds so often. Actually, we’ve been cutting down since Brian had his surgery. When they discovered clotting in some of his arteries, as healthy as he is, we all got scared.
My thoughts wandered to the doctor again. I wanted to forget him and move on with my life, but he just kept popping back into my mind. He had betrayed me in a way that no professional doctor should. In an odd way too, because it wasn’t all that big a deal. It could have been worse, and wasn’t even close to rape.
That made me think. If something terrible like that happened to me, would I tell anyone? I didn’t think so. I would keep it inside me until it drove me insane. Even Mandy could do something like it. We already had an abusive relationship, but not a mutual one. If she hits me, I won’t ever hit back, because, well, she’s a girl. And it’s simply absurd and unethical. Sort of like beating up on an elderly person, except Mandy’s got defenses like a cat. Besides, at the time, her and I were mostly separated for weeks at a time, months at some points. We never had a single chance in our relationship to get that close, even so sometimes I wanted to. But if I suggested something like that, I was afraid I would be alone once more. Then again, being with Mandy is like being alone, but with some company.
I thought about the doctor again and convinced myself that no doctor would ever do something like that, it was absurd. ‘Maybe he did it ‘cause my butt’s just a big old target,’ I thought. I grabbed a chunk of my rear end with the one hand that wasn’t shoveling food into my mouth. ‘Yup, that was definitely it.’
When I had devoured a large portion of the food supply, I trotted back to the bathroom to hurl it into the potty. I wasn’t really aware that I had a problem, just that I couldn’t keep anything down. It didn’t really matter to me if did anyway, well at least for a while. The less fat I gained the better. I lost weight like this for a while, before watching a program on television on bulimia nervosa. I found myself nodding at all of the symptoms and gagging at the effects of this disease. Out of fear for my esophagus and my healthy white teeth, I marched right back to my psychiatrist and got help. He was very surprised, but I caught it before it went completely out of control. Somehow I also managed to this without arousing the suspicion of any of the guys.
Chapter 43
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