As the last echo of his words subsided, I realized I had won this altercation. Because that is what the conversation had become. He lost the moral high ground during his earlier monologue and now he was losing his composure. I wanted out of his office before I told Dr. Lowe what I really thought of him.
“This hospital has never once asked me to restrain a psychotic patient or one that is all hyped up on drugs, yet I have done it. Never once have you complained when I prevented injury to your staff in the past. I’m big. I’m strong, and I have an extensive background in martial arts. I’m not trying to brag; it is what it is. Plus, you know I’m ex-military.”
Dr. Lowe gave me a bored look, prompting me to get to the point.
“I realize I’m a doctor in your hospital, but I’m also perfectly capable in dangerous situations. More capable than your so-called professionals. The poor security guard that showed up first had no firearm and no training. Trust me; he would have made it worse. You would probably have a dead security guard and a dead doctor right now.”
“You don’t know that!”
“You’re right; I don’t know for sure how it might have turned out. But I do know I saved the day. Me. Without being asked. Talk to Sgt. Walters; you can get the full story from him. As for me, ever since I entered your office, I have sensed hostility and contempt in your voice that lends me to believe that you lack objectivity. I realize that for me the conflict upstairs is over and that for you it is just beginning since you have to worry about hospital liability and such. It must be stressful to carry around all that responsibility; I know I wouldn’t want it. However, I am choosing not to engage in this conversation any longer.” I stood up again during the last sentence indicating my intention to leave. “You really should have started with thank you, or at least, a ‘glad to see you are alright’ before second guessing me.”
“I do not appreciate your tone, doctor. I am Chief of Medicine in this hospital. I will decide when this meeting is over, and you have to listen, like it or not! So sit!”
I remained standing. “No,” I said evenly.
“No! No, what?”
“No, I will not sit down. No, I do not have to listen to you. You would like me to, but I do not have to. I will stay momentarily; however, I will not sit, and I am retaining my right to leave if this conversation declines any further. Before you resume, maybe you better ask yourself how you would feel if the life I had saved today had been your own.”
The redness in his face and neck was complete. If he got any redder, I was going to need to write him a prescription for high blood pressure medication.
Struggling to regain his composure, he continued through gritted teeth, “Dr. McCain, you are somewhat of an enigma to me. You were a fine resident physician in this hospital. You finished your residency, and you also recently passed all your boards in physical medicine and rehabilitation. We offered you a position in our hospital as a physiatrist; instead, you turned down our offer and applied for emergency care. You said you needed some time to decide some things and would love the flexibility that often accompanies an ER schedule, so we obliged you. Then we discover that you are building your own medical clinic here in Memphis. Yes, we know about your little building, and we realize we were short-sighted in not having a non-compete agreement with you. After all we have done for you, you demonstrate your thanks by embarrassing this institution today, all while potentially involving us in expensive litigation.”
“Dr. Lowe, I want to thank you for your candor. I find it refreshing and illuminating. I also find it insulting and misguided; therefore, I’m going to leave before I say something that you might regret. I will show up for work tomorrow as usual unless otherwise instructed. Let me know through formal correspondence; that is, written correspondence, stating if and when I am to meet with the hospital board and/or your attorneys. For now, I’m going to take you up on your offer and take the rest of the day off. Between now and my shift tomorrow, I will try not to save anyone; I would not want to embarrass your hospital. Good day.”
I turned and walked out without looking back, careful to not slam the door that I so badly wanted to slam. Dr. Lowe was stammering something as I left, but I had already tuned him out.
***
Anger. A normal, usually healthy, human emotion. Unless it gets out of control. Then it turns destructive. For the first time today, I was angry. Incensed was a better word. Not at Tom Harty, but at Dr. Lowe. Dr. Lowe had the distinct honor of being the first person today that I actually wanted to hit; I had hit Tom Harty out of necessity. I wonder if hitting your boss is considered destructive behavior.
Hoping to avoid disappointment, I had entered the meeting with low expectations. I should have set my expectations even lower. The “last notch on the limbo bar” low. The impossibly low notch. Even then I might have been surprised. I had expected second guessing. Arm-chair quarterbacking. However, I expected it to come more in the form of how could the hospital have prevented the situation in the first place. Which they could not have prevented. Not without armed guards with metal detectors at the entrances. Hostility, on the other hand, was not expected.
I was half way home, my feet attacking the pavement with each angry step, when anger started to transform into amazement. I was amazed that Dr. Lowe did not realize that we had been lucky today. Lucky I had spotted the man. Lucky my inner voice had alerted me. Lucky Tom Harty was an idiot. Lucky that I had practiced gun disarms probably more than 500 times in my past. Hopefully, the hospital board was not as myopic.
Instead of relishing on the positives that came out of today, Dr. Lowe focused on the negative and tried to browbeat me because I handled it differently than he would have. Of course, I handled it differently than he did. Guys like him run away from those types of situations. That was not a slam on his character. My guess was that most normal people run away from a man with a gun.
And he was wrong about my office building, although I was going to save that explanation for another day. I did not like Dr. Lowe, but I did not want him as an adversary. It appeared I might not have a choice.
The day was simply getting worse. I was going home to disconnect the phone line and turn off my pager. The day might get even worse, but the world would have to wait until tomorrow to tell me about it.
CHAPTER 4
I was not sure who first said something about turning lemons into lemonade, but I was looking forward to a good workout and time to work on a car that I had recently purchased following a bank repossession. The previous owner had purposely blown the motor and vandalized his own car when he realized he could no longer afford the payments. I had been slowly putting the beautiful red Mercedes convertible back together for a couple of months.
My loft apartment was located on the second floor of a commercial office building within walking distance from the hospital. The building had originally been a large department store from the 1930s. On the first floor of the old brick building was John Deland, attorney-at-law. He was a civil lawyer who kept himself busy with real estate, wills, trusts, contracts, and the occasional divorce. There was also a music store, Daddyo’s Music, which sold or rented all types of musical instruments and equipment. The owner, Steve West, was a nerdy-looking, tiny white guy who could play the guitar so well that I figured he could give B.B. King or Eddie Van Halen a run for his money. He was also one heck of a business man. I had owned the building for a little over two years, and Steve hinted more than once that he would be willing to take over the attorney’s space if the opportunity arose. He would even pay for the build-out.
In between the two businesses was the street access to the second floor. Two large, custom copper doors provided an entrance to the stairway to the second floor. The copper had not acquired a full patina yet, but the doors were still beautiful and looked as if they could withstand a bazooka attack. I climbed the stairs to a small landing at the top. Two doors were located at the top of the landing. I entered the door on the right, but it did not matter since both
doors opened into my apartment.
My apartment consisted of the whole second floor of the old building in a completely open floor plan except for two large enclosed bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The commercial tiled floors looked new, while dozens of black and white photographs of Memphis and the Mississippi River adorned the plain, white walls. The ceilings were over ten feet high and covered with a unique wood grid design. My favorite feature was the numerous windows, each of them slightly more than six feet in height, which allowed ample amounts of ambient light to filter into my apartment from the outside.
Eventually, my goal was to divide the second floor into two large upscale apartments; however, I was in no hurry since the building was turning a profit as it was and I was enjoying all the space. With a little over 5500 square feet upstairs, there was even room for my own gym. I promptly changed into some clothes more appropriate for working on the Mercedes and grabbed a glass of water from the area designated as the kitchen. The message light on my answering machine was blinking. Hesitantly, I hit play hoping the message was not from the hospital. It was worse; the message was from my mother. Without hesitation, I deleted the message. When is she going to learn, I want nothing to do with her.
The Mercedes was located downstairs in the old department store’s loading dock, which I had converted into my personal garage. I used the freight elevator down to the loading dock and smiled at the progress I had made with the Mercedes. It was in pieces, a genuine work-in-progress, but the new motor and transmission were in place. With any luck, I could get all the different accessories hooked up and have it running within a week. I fired up a Blues compilation CD and went to work. I was able to work on the Mercedes for a couple of hours before heading upstairs to spend the next 40 minutes on the weights followed by 20 minutes on the heavy bag. The time was well spent, in fact, curative as it allowed me to channel my anger towards Dr. Lowe into something more constructive. The infuriation I felt towards Dr. Lowe was gone. In its place, was a state of eagerness as I looked forward to my date tonight.
I took a shower, changed into some casual clothes — jeans and a nice, well-fitting pullover shirt. I had just enough time to walk across town to my girlfriend’s place of employment. Upon exiting my front door, the overpowering smell of perfume and hairspray overtook me, forcing me to turn suddenly and spot a TV reporter running up to me with a microphone in hand. Nicole Cassano. A reporter for the local ABC affiliate. A camera man was briskly following her. Dr. Lowe had said that they were unable to keep my name out of the press.
I was a minor the first time that I had been involved in a similar situation, making me off limits to the press; they could not even publish or mention my name. I was 33, not 16 this time. No longer off limits. The press added a new dimension, a new wrinkle to my current situation that I had not considered. My inner voice was cussing me out, telling me that I should have expected the intrusion. It was right, of course, but, honestly, I did not expect anyone to find me so fast; my phone was unlisted, and I used a P.O. Box.
“Dr. McCain!” I turned my back on the pretty blonde-haired reporter. “Dr. McCain, may I have a word with you?” Exasperated, but refusing to show it in front of the camera, I simply unlocked the door and re-entered the building. She was still yelling at me through the heavy door. “Dr. McCain, please, may I have a word with you? I am friends with Ellie. I’m not here to…”
The closure of the heavy door cut her off mid sentence. Apparently, the door could withstand more than a bazooka attack; it could shut up a nosy, pesky reporter. I appreciated the heavy construction of the old brick building. I did not appreciate Nicole Cassano.
I could not blame her though as I imagined the headline: Man lies in coma after attack at Memphis Memorial. She was trying to get her exclusive; however, bringing Ellie into it was too much for me. If I did let anyone interview me, it would not be Ms. Cassano.
Glancing out one of my front windows revealed that Nicole and her cameraman were still milling around my front entrance. They were apparently in for the long haul. I felt violated as I realized that my privacy was going to be more difficult to keep, especially if Ms. Cassano’s desire to find me was fueled for any reason. The way I saw it, there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that her interest in me might increase; one directly proportional to Mr. Harty’s mortality rate. Plus, if she found me so easily, then maybe other reporters might be motivated as well. Honestly, it just did not seem that big of a story to me, so I could not understand the interest.
I considered giving Ms. Cassano her exclusive interview. Maybe then it would all just go away. But she had brought up Ellie. That was a cheap shot. I was not going to give her an interview. The good news was that I knew she would leave soon. It was shortly after 6:00 and the news broadcast would be over at 6:30. Time to wait her out. To pass the time, I read a journal article discussing facet joints as a major factor in low back pain. The article was a joke. How the authors got it past a review board was beyond me. Their sample size was too small to provide any real evidence, plus saying that facet joints were a potential cause of low back pain was like saying that falling could give you a boo-boo. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
At 6:15, I could hear Ms. Cassano from an open window giving her live report from “outside the home of Dr. L.T. McCain.”
L.T. McCain. She hadn’t even bothered taking the time to figure out my actual name, so how the hell did she find me so fast?
As expected, Ms. Cassano mentioned that I had been contacted “but refused comment.” I found it difficult to resist the urge to go back downstairs and open and close the front door repeatedly in a game of peek-a-boo making her think that I was trying to bolt past her. Common sense won the battle over mischievousness. By 6:25, they were packed up in the van and gone.
***
Tonight’s date was planned before I became the unofficial security detail for Memphis Memorial Hospital, and I was not going to break my date with Ellie. Even so, my instincts warned me that dinner with Ellie might get a little weird. I expected to answer a multitude of questions from Ellie. It made sense. Ellie, my girlfriend for the last year, was the chief meteorologist at the local ABC affiliate station, the same news station that employed Ms. Cassano.
Walking was no longer an option if I planned on arriving on time, so I took the elevator down to the loading dock. The Mercedes was not operational, which left a choice between two other vehicles. One was a classic sports car that was a gift from my father, which I never drove. I opted for my 1984 Jeep CJ-7 Laredo, the first vehicle I ever purchased. I bought it new off the lot when I left the Navy and returned to the States from Southeast Asia.
Ten minutes later I was pulling into the TV station parking lot, taking care to park in a discreet location while waiting for Ellie; I did not need Nicole spotting me and trying again for her exclusive. Memphis Minnie was belting out “Hoodoo Lady Blues” on the stereo when I spotted Ellie leaving the employee entrance exactly on time. Backlit by the sun, her silhouette moved gracefully across the parking lot towards her car, the shimmering tresses of her long brown hair trailing behind her as her head moved side to side slowly, scanning the environment. I turned up my stereo just as Minnie sung the words “Boy, you better watch it ‘cause she’s tricky,” hoping it was loud enough to get her attention. It worked. Ellie switched directions, smiling as she headed for my Jeep.
I smiled back, more to myself than for her benefit, as I realized that the beautiful woman heading my way was my girlfriend. She carried her lean, 5’10” frame with a grace usually reserved for dancers; my mother would approve. Ellie was easily the most beautiful woman I had ever met.
“Howdy, sailor, this is a surprise. Were those song lyrics meant for me?” She looked amused.
“No, just a coincidence. Why? You feeling it?”
Her smile turned from amused to mischievous. “Maybe, you never can tell about us Southern girls. So, we are taking your car?”
I think I enjoyed listening to her talk more than watching
her walk. Her voice had the perfect Southern accent, with a musical lilt to it that was such a delight that it was nearly infectious. Most of Memphis seemed to agree; Ellie Carmichael was the most popular meteorologist in Memphis.
“If you don’t mind some wind in your hair, then sure.”
Seemingly from out of nowhere, Ellie produced a scarf that she used to tie her hair back into a ponytail before climbing into the Jeep. I was in the mood for Thai food, and I knew just the place, Thai Garden, on the edge of downtown.
We were greeted at the restaurant by a young Thai woman whose name tag said Sarah; however, I knew her real name was Sirikit. She was always friendly and seemed genuinely happy to see me. I was a regular; in fact, it was my favorite place in all of Memphis to eat, although I would not admit that to my Southern friends. They would only argue that it was un-American to eat so much Thai food in a town famous for its barbecue. What can I say: I love the spicy food and stupid Americans need to learn to eat more vegetables anyway.
“Mŏr McCain. Good to see you. We have booth for you, just way you like. Khun Ellie, so good to see you.”
I caused Sirikit to commit a cultural faux pas as it is customary to use the first name preceded by the Thai equivalent of Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc., but then I don’t give out my first name willingly.
I replied, “Khun Sirikit, thank you. Khuṇdūs̄wy māk nıwạn nī̂.”
She blushed slightly, and then seated us.
“L.T., what did you say to her to make her blush like that?”
“I told her she looked pretty today. At least I hope I did. I only learned a little Thai, and it has been a few years. Hopefully, I did not just ask her to marry me or something.”
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