Out Cold ddm-3

by Tom Schreck

  Monique walked back from the kitchen with her customary cup of chamomile tea. She wore a throwback baseball cap from the Negro League team, the Pittsburgh Grays.

  "Nice lid," I said.

  "Thanks, Duff."

  "Satchel Paige's team, right?"

  "Actually, no. Josh Gibson's."

  "He was like the black Babe Ruth wasn't he?"

  "Babe Ruth, isn't he in second?"

  "Now he's in third. Bonds broke Aaron's record."

  "Don't get me started," she said.

  She placed the tea down, rolled in her desk chair, and got out her first file. She did the same thing in the same way everyday and never looked under pressure.

  "Hey 'Unique? You ever have to get VA records on a client?"

  "Sure, all the time."

  "Why does it take forever?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I asked for Karl's info weeks ago and I've gotten nothing."

  "That's weird. Usually the VA gets stuff to you for the first visit."

  "When I called, they said the chart was out and wouldn't be back for awhile."

  "I suppose that's possible."

  "Great."

  I guess it didn't matter much in regard to Karl's treatment. I mean, the guy wore a football helmet and rubber gloves, and taking all sorts of drugs, prescribed and unprescribed. A bunch of Army hospital gibberish would only bore the shit out of me if I ever read it.

  I decided before I began the day's procrastination in earnest I needed some really bad lukewarm coffee to get me going. I got up from the Duffy's Cubicle of Love and came face to face with the Michelin Woman.

  "Good morning, Duffy," she said through a grimace. At least that's the way I interpreted her non-verbals.

  "Hey Claudia."

  "Duffy could you do me a favor today?"

  "For you, boss, anything."

  "Vorhees High School has a computer they want to donate. Could you drive out there and get it?"

  "Sure."

  "This won't be an excuse for not having your paperwork up to date. I trust you've gotten caught up at this point."

  "Of course," I said. I never passed on a chance to go for a ride and get out of the office. I wasn't in the mood for paperwork anyway. It was also, maybe, a chance to snoop around about my buddy Karl.

  Vorhees High is in the hills about 20 miles away, and I took the nice drive. Vorhees is one of the small villages people escaped to when they left Crawford. More and more Crawford was starting to feel like a northern borough of New York City and the Crawfordians weren't pleased with it.

  Going into a high school is always a trip. It surprises me just how young the kids are and how much skin the girls show on the average school day. I don't know if that's Brittney's, Paris's or Lindsay's fault, but I knew if I was fourteen and had to sit around all day and pretend I wasn't looking at the half naked girls around me, I'd go out of my mind. I remember keeping my hands in my pockets to hide my day dreams enough back in McDonough.

  McDonough was what I pictured a high school should look like. Old, made of concrete and smelled of disinfectant and whatever it is they season schools with. McDonough was probably a modern school when it was built in the 40's, but the 40's happened a while ago and it wasn't modern anymore. There had a few computers around, but not as many as you'd think in today's high school. When you did see a computer, the off-white plastic looked like an out of place anachronism as if they didn't belong there or at least not yet. McDonough was dark, not very friendly, and it carried the weight of the years it spent in the worst section of the city.

  VHS gave off a much different feel. First of all, it was bright with a forced cheeriness that didn't fool me for a second. It had a smell to it that was probably a newer more eco-friendly disinfectant and different type of floor wax. The kids looked different than the kids at MHS. These kids were almost all white. There were a few Indian kids whose dads, I guessed, were doctors, and just one or two black kids. The place reeked of Abercrombie and Fitch, and the girls went to tanning salons and got their nails done. Somehow it seemed a meaner, more exclusionary place even though it was far less diverse than its inner city counterparts. Maybe at McDonough had more skin colors, but fewer classes of people.

  I had to buzz my way into the school, sign in, get a big orange badge, and be escorted to my destination. I know about Columbine and all the other high school dangers, but the whole system struck me as bizarre. As if I came to the place with some sort of high-powered assault weapon, a buzzer, a badge, and an escort would somehow deter me.

  My escort was a five-foot tall guy with a wispy mustache and squeaky plastic shoes. His nametag said Mr. Teters. He struck me as the kind of teacher who gets spitballs shot at his head for eight hours a day. He didn't say 'Hello' or anything else and just walked with me in silence. He pointed me down a hallway toward their storage room, past the 'Snack Attack' collection boxes I now realized were everywhere, and let me go. Apparently, my danger to VHS had been assessed and deemed low, or it was dangerously close to my escort's break. Just before the storage room I noticed the nurse's office. The door was open and a couple kids hung around surely trying to get a medical reason to blow off social studies or whatever the hell Mr. Teters taught. Under the nurse's office sign the name placard said 'Ms. Bentley.'

  I guess I had stood in front of the door for longer than I thought because I was interrupted by a pretty thirty-something woman with short black hair just barely touching her shoulders and an attractive, but a bit weathered, face. Pretty kind of overstated it-she looked like ten years ago she was a knockout and since then life had gotten in the way.

  "Can I help you?" She didn't smile. Behind her a fat kid held his stomach and groaning on the couch.

  "Jimmy, stop it. Your mother's coming in and you'll get to go home." Jimmy immediately stopped and suppressed a smile.

  "Are you Ms. Bentley?"

  "Yeah…"

  "My name is Duffy Dombrowski. I'm a counselor at Jewish Unified Services."

  "Yeah?"

  "Do you have a second to talk?"

  She looked at fatso Jimmy, who had ceased moaning.

  "Sure, come in to my office."

  She ushered me into a small office with a battleship grey desk. There were posters on the wall about brushing your teeth, underage drinking, and abstinence from sex.

  "What can I help you with?"

  "I'm your ex-husband Sparky's counselor and…"

  "He wasn't ever my husband, and I don't have anything to do with him any more."

  "Yeah and-"

  "Is that why you're here? I didn't sign up to be part of his treatment. You can't just come out and talk to people without permission. Do you have a release? Are you familiar with HIPPA regs?"

  I had forgotten she belonged in the human services sisterhood.

  "I know, this is technically wrong. It isn't an official visit. I'm actually here picking up a used computer."

  "What?"

  "You see, I wanted to let you know Sparky is doing really, really well. He's going to meetings, he's taking getting better very seriously."

  "Well, I'm glad for him, but we are very much through." She shook her head and looked away from me.

  "Look, this isn't any of my business, but not being able to see his little girl is really messing with Sparky. He's trying…"

  "That's it, this conversation is over." She stood up. "You are one of the most unprofessional human service people I've ever run into. You don't just go up to people you don't know, not ask their side of the story, and plead your case. I'm sorry, I've got to go back to work." She walked around the desk and past me.

  "Just think about it. I'm betting he never had a counselor advocate for him like this. Let that mean something, Ms. Bentley."

  She didn't say anything. She went out and checked on fatso Jimmy, who was amusing himself by making fart noises into the back of his hand.

  14

  I grabbed the old Mac computer with the handle on the bac
k and headed down the hallway. We had a Windows system at the clinic, which rendered this donation pretty useless, but that's how human services donations worked.

  When I got to the lobby, I took a look at the school's trophy case. I loved looking at the dated trophies, faded leather footballs and basketballs, and the cut away nets from championship games. VHS played in the Suburban League, made up of all white country boys and rich kids. They never ever went up against McDonough or any of the other urban schools. It was part of why their parents moved out here in the first place. I looked at the football stuff from their big Suburban League championship year in '99. The Mountain Crows went 101 and lost the Class B state championship in overtime on what the plaque suggested was a bad call. The memorabilia saluted the players and the heroes of the great '99 time. On the Suburban league trophy they had the coach and the captains names engraved: Coach Skip Steenburg, Captains Mike Pendergast, Bill Meyerson, Chip Newstrom, and Karl Greene.

  Yep, Karl Greene.

  "Can I help you, sir?" A guy in a VHS golf shirt, with a whistle around his neck, said.

  "Nah, I was just going down memory lane with the Mountain Crows."

  "You can't hang around. You have an orange pass, red."

  "I don't follow?"

  "The orange ones are temps. You need a red one to hang around all day."

  "Oh, sorry," I said, though I wasn't sure about what. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "The captains of the football team, do you remember them?"

  "Of course. Two of them are still in the area. Pendergast works for the state and is the offensive coordinator on the football team and Meyerson is an accountant with some big firm."

  "What about Newstrom and Greene, you remember them?"

  "Sure, great kids. Besides being football captains they were class officers. Newstrom was president and Greene was his VP. After graduation they enlisted. I think they got in Special Forces in the military, but we've kind of lost track of them in the last few years. I wouldn't be surprised if they're both big time heroes now," the coach said with a smile.

  "Yeah? Really? You don't say?" was all I could say. My interaction with Coach Whoever slowed down after that and I realized he was staring at me as I looked into the trophy case. Life just isn't fair when you got the wrong colored tag, so I figured it was time to go.

  I got back to the clinic with the computer everyone immediately deemed useless. Just the same it had been worth it to me to get out of the office. Trina watered her plants and I hung around just long enough to see her water the plant hanging from the ceiling. It was my favorite, not because I care about plants, but because she had to stretch to reach it. Trina's black clingy T-shirt rode up, as she stretched to reach the pot, to show a very flat stomach and an adorable belly button. An inny-which was good. Outies kind of gross me out.

  "Duff? Hello? Why don't you take a picture?" Trina said. Her tone had mock anger to it, but her eyes smiled as she said it. I smiled, too.

  "Need any help?"

  "Not the kind you're offering?" A pretty good line considering our history.

  I also got a twinge of guilt. I wasn't quite sure where admiring Trina's navel fit in on the engagement-commitment continuum. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be asking clarification from my fiance on the matter.

  "Hey, check this out. I went out at Vorhees High, and did you know Karl captained the championship football team?"

  "Is that why he wears a football helmet all the time?"

  "Not only that, he was vice president of the class and generally an all around big man on campus."

  "Damn. How does that guy become Karl?"

  "I'm guessing the Army didn't help."

  "That sucks. You never really hear much about the mentally screwed up guys. It's almost worse than getting hurt physically."

  "Yeah-I think I'd rather get hurt physically," I said.

  "Hey-by the way you seem better today-even better than just yesterday. Did you go to the doctor?"

  "Better? Better than what?"

  "You're not staring off in to space, you're not wobbling, and you haven't repeated yourself in this whole conversation," she said without smiling.

  "I wasn't doing that shit, was I? Really?" She just looked at me and shook her head.

  My head still throbbed every now and then, but in the last couple of days it did seem a lot less painful. Today was the one day of the week we had our consulting psychiatrist in. Dr. Laura Meade was this season's model. I say that because we switched shrinks every couple of months for a couple of reasons. One was our pay sucked, so they usually picked up extra hours in our clinic until they could find extra hours someplace that paid them more money. The second reason, they got to do very little therapy, because they had to manage all the psychiatric medications the clients got prescribed. Mostly clients came in for fifteen minutes, got a new prescription, or got the old one adjusted, and moved on. It wasn't much fun for the shrink. I have to admit that though I've had my problems with some of the whack jobs who have been assigned to us in the psychiatric department, I liked Laura. She had just completed her psychiatric residency and couldn't have been even thirty yet-she looked closer to twenty-five. She did triathlons for fun, so she had an athletic build that was still attractive, probably because she did them for fun and not competition. She wore her long straight dirty blond hair gathered in a ponytail and leaned toward cargo pants, T-shirts, and running shoes for a wardrobe. Never a hint of make up, but she had something incredibly feminine about her-strong and feminine.

  She'd been around for a couple of months, but because of her schedule I barely had said hello to her. Today, I wanted to catch her with a few questions.

  "Excuse me, Doc?" I said as she came out of the ladies room.

  "Hi Duff. Do me a favor-don't call me that," she said.

  "Why? You're a doctor, right?"

  "Yeah, but the term 'Doc' kind of has a certain feel to it. Like some sort of special authoritative fraternity. I don't want to be thought of in those terms."

  "Okay, I think I got it." It seemed like a fair request.

  "What can I help you with?"

  "I have a couple of questions about one of the guys on my caseload. You haven't seen him yet. His name is Karl."

  "It will be tough for me to comment on him then." I noticed I could see the veins in her arms and when she put her hands on her hips the biceps flexed. Not like a weightlifter's, but like an endurance athlete's.

  "Well, Karl came back from the war and he's got some major paranoia. He's all into conspiracy theories and he's got some pretty strange behavior."

  "Like what?"

  "He wears a football helmet and rubber gloves because he thinks people are out to get him."

  "Is anyone out to get him?"

  "Well, he keeps getting beat up around town, probably because of his bizarre behavior."

  "Sounds like people are out to get him. Maybe a football helmet makes sense," she said.

  I hadn't anticipated that kind of comment from a shrink.

  "Anyway, by chance I found out that in high school, before his Army stint, Karl was a high-achieving kid from the suburbs. An athlete, a scholar; your basic big man on campus. My question is, how does a guy get to where Karl is now when only a few years ago he did so well."

  "I can only answer in generalities, but there are a few possible explanations." She paused and looked up at the ceiling while she thought.

  "He might be schizophrenic and its onset came on in the last few years, but he should've shown some danger signs in high school. It might be trauma from the war he dealt with by breaking from reality or, if he's a drug user, the drugs could've caused a chemically induced psychosis. It could also be a little bit of all three."

  " Hmmm…so he could've been normal and then something happened along the way."

  "Something clearly happened along the way. We just don't know what. The question is, did something happen organically, meaning was there something in his brain c
hemistry pre-set for him to have psychiatric episodes, or did an environment filled with trauma touch it off? That trauma can also include heavy drug use."

  She looked at her watch.

  "Duff, I have to get to my next med review. Nice talking to you." She extended her hand and gave me a firm, quite androgynous handshake.

  It got me thinking. Could there be a crazy time-bomb in any of us waiting for the right fuse to set it off? Or were the cards dealt in this existential game of Texas Hold 'Em what held our fate? Did 'Ol Karl just land on the wrong Monopoly square and now he's destined to sport Redskins headgear and be equipped for washing the world's dishes. I had an awful lot to think about. When I had that much to think about, it was best for me to do something mindless. Since my files ran out of date back to Nixon's term, I decided to write in some of them. Trina was doing something with the petty cash box when I went to grab some files.

  "Hey, Duff."

  "Hey, Trina"

  "Did you hear?"

  "Hear what?"

  "Homeland Security just arrested six members of Al Qaeda in Chicago."

  "Holy shit. What happened?"

  "About to dump some bio poison into the reservoir." No kidding, holy shit.

  15

  "It's if they all live in the same house," Rocco said.

  "It doesn't have to be in the same house," Jerry Number One said.

  "Hold it-you're saying if a bunch of women live together they have the same periods?" TC said.

  "They don't have to be in the same house; it could be in the same office," Jerry Number One said.

  "What about the Ladies Auxiliary of the Knights of Columbus? Could they all have the same period?" Jerry Number Two said. He wore a T-shirt that said "AA is for quitters."

  "It has to be in the same house. Period!" Rocco said.

  "I think the Knightettes are long past their periods," TC said.

  "The change?" Jerry Number one said.

  "I don't got any change. I left it for AJ," TC said.

  "No. I'm talking about the hot flashes, the irritableness, and the puffiness," Jerry Number One said.

  "I don't think they get puffy. I think that's part of it; they don't puff up any more," TC said.