by Bill Scheft
Mort was still asleep. The door did not wake him when it closed, nor the rustling of the Post, which College Boy read backward from sports to page seven, which he devoured until 8:05.
Dirt King to Lawyers: I don’t dig you no more
Former Parks Deparment employee Ernest “The Dirt King” Giovia fired both his attorneys yesterday and will represent himself when his trial concludes Monday.
Giovia, whose conviction on ten counts of racketeering, embezzlement and extortion of city funds is a virtual certainty, did not take the stand during his trial but will undoubtedly use his new position as pro se counsel to make a post-verdict statement before the court.
Thursday was not the best of days for Giovia’s former attorneys, Salvatore Messina and Seth Axelrod. Shortly after they were scooped and tossed by The Dirt King, they were questioned by New York City police in connection with the mysterious food poisoning epidemic that struck four sequestered Giovia trial jurors Wednesday night and delayed the verdict until Monday.
“Kid, where am I now?”
“Yale Club, Mort.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“The bathroom, then the doctor. And breakfast somewhere in between. I assume you’d rather eat up here than the grill room.”
“Yes I would.”
“Good.”
“How come you’re handling things so well?”
“I can’t answer you, Mort.”
“Fair enough. Get the on-deck bat.”
“Uh, I forgot to pack it. Fuck!”
“Shhh. They’ll think there’s somebody from Dartmouth in here.”
College Boy choked out a soft “sorry.”
“Now before we head for the john, run by me again where I am.”
21
Dr. Michael Zing was the best kind of bald man. The kind that laughed and pointed to his head and said, “You think you have problems? Yesterday I had hair!” He walked into his waiting room only fifteen minutes late Friday morning, a blazer weakly trying to conceal the ensemble he’d been wearing when he hustled off the ninth green to the parking lot.
“Okay, who’s the sick one?”
“I love this guy,” whispered Sheila.
“Don’t tell me. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Sheila had to run back to 301 East Sixty-fifth before Mort and College Boy got in to see Dr. Zing. When he came back out and saw she was gone, he said, “Damn. I was going to guess her.”
That was the end of shtick from Michael Zing, geriatric psychopharmacologist. He had more, but he’d had better audiences than Mort and College Boy. He looked in Mort’s eyes, which might have been blank with fear had they not been frozen in a particularly heartbreaking Parkinsonian symptom known as “The Mask.” Then he asked College Boy for a list of his uncle’s medications, which College Boy furnished along with Mort’s pillbox, a four-tiered plastic file that looked like a miniature set from Hollywood Squares. For however long, ten minutes short of eternity, Dr. Zing poked through the list, the box, and two or three huge books, stopping only to pinch the bridge of his nose and clamp his eyes shut.
“Mr. Spell, any history of epilepsy?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t think so,” said College Boy. “Mort, you’re not epileptic, are you?”
“No, Pierson.”
“That was his college at Yale.”
“Tell me about it,” mumbled Dr. Zing. “They used to kill us in touch football. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Sussman.” College Boy stood up to make it official. “Uh, ah, C.B. Sussman. C. B. Sussman.”
“Mr. Sussman, your uncle ever have seizures?”
“Well, something happened to him in the hospital in Boston. Was that a seizure?”
“No. Epileptic seizures.”
“No. Not that I’m aware of.”
“Well, how long has he been on Depakote?”
“Since August.”
“Eight months ago August?”
“Yes. It was one of the medications he was put on after he left Mount Sinai. By his psychiatrist, Dr. Levitz.”
Dr. Zing pinched the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t look up, and he knew Mort wouldn’t know if he did. “Congratulations, Mr. Spell,” he moaned, “I think you’ve been part of a field project.”
Morton Martin Spell had not been a participant in the conversation since he’d uttered “Pierson.” Mask hardened by room temperature, fight gone, chased by the conviction that his nephew (Had the kid made up some alias?) had now enlisted this 12-handicapper to put him away for good, Mort faded to blank. Shaking into the woodwork, he never heard Dr. Zing’s sardonic congratulations, nor the long exchange that followed.
College Boy gasped for accuracy as he told Zing about Mort coming off Levitz’s prescribed Valium while in Mount Sinai and the two biting incidents following his prostate operation. Once he was out, he went back to Levitz, who’d had put him on four new medications: Prozac, Wellbutrin, Halcion, and Depakote. The Halcion was for those nights he had trouble sleeping. College Boy, like the rest of the supply side economic world, had heard of Prozac. Mort told him Levitz had said the other two, Wellbutrin and Depakote, “helped the Prozac along,” but, he added, “Levitz never said which one was the vermouth and which one was the olive.”
Three weeks after that, Mort saw Graham the neurologist, who concurred with Levitz’s Parkinson’s diagnosis and added medication Number Five, Sinemet. For a while after the move, the tremors were manageable and Mort seemed less erratic. Might have been a month, might have been a day. Then life descended. At one point, College Boy called Graham, who explained the progression of Parkinson’s Disease in patients over seventy tended to be more rapid and any further evaluation of Mort before six months would be a waste of everyone’s time. So, they went along. It had been six months at the end of January, but by then, Mort was no longer interested in being carted to New York to see Graham. When College Boy suggested they might find a neurologist close by, Mort told his nephew, “Let’s revisit this when you come to me for a raise in the spring.” All prescriptions kept getting called in and refilled, and no doctors were sought until Mort’s fall last Friday. Last Friday? Christ, had it been only a week?
Dr. Zing tried not to nod too much while the nephew, this earnest man, C. B. Sussman, filled him in. The phrase “brought him up to speed” is not applicable here. Once Dr. Zing saw “Depakote” and heard “last August,” he parked himself two laps ahead of College Boy and waited for him to finish.
If you don’t like to be wrong, don’t become a psychopharmacologist. Michael Zing, who during his senior year at Yale (when he’d had hair) hit .378 as the starting shortstop for the Elis, had chosen a profession with an initial success percentage only slightly higher. It was a branch of medical science that aspired to imprecision. But after being raised in the shadow of his father’s manic depression and the barbarism with which it was treated and untreated, it was the only path that emerged. Ironically, that was the last time in Michael Zing’s life the guesswork had been removed. The second-to-last time had been in 1974, nine days short of his old man’s fifty-third birthday, when he stood outside of Central Synagogue and refused to let his father’s psychiatrist in to the funeral.
“Let me tell you everything I know, Mr. Sussman.”
Sheila was right. You had to like this guy. What doctor ever said, “Let me tell you everything I know,” even if he didn’t? And what doctor could do that while casually, stunningly casually, siphoning five vials of blood from a seventy-six-year-old man?
What Dr. Zing should have said was “Let me tell you everything I’m sure of,” but he opted for comfort over semantics. The reason he’d asked about epilepsy was because, since its introduction in the United States in 1983, Depakote had been marketed exclusively to treat epileptics. Only recently had the possibility been raised that the drug could be effective in combating bipolar depression or mania. There were side effects—whoo boy were there side effects—but so many
of them, including tremors, were shared by many antidepression medications.
“What are you saying?”
“I’d rather not come to a conclusion before I look at the blood-work,” said Dr. Zing. “But until then, let’s drop his Depakote from 1,500 milligrams down to two pills, 500 milligrams, for the next few days. This medication business is unfortunately a lot of trial and error. You ever play baseball, C. B.?”
“Huh? Baseball? Yeah, a bit.”
“I knew it. You fail seven out of ten times for fifteen years in the big leagues, where do you end up?”
“Cooperstown.”
“Right. I’ll see you and your uncle Monday afternoon at two. We’ll know a little more then.”
As he helped them out, Michael Zing put his arm around College Boy and asked him if, in lieu of his fee, he might sell him some hair. Mort, in a blaze of perfect timing, jumped in softly. “You’ll have to go through me, doctor.”
They staggered to a cab back to the Yale Club, College Boy only slightly better than his uncle, and collapsed dead asleep until Sheila woke them with a phone call just after six to ask how it had gone in the room with Dr. Zing.
“It’s four less pills and we have to see him Monday.”
“And?”
“That’s all I know.”
“Well, it sounds like he has some idea.”
“I was hoping you’d tell me how I should feel.”
“I’d be scared and hopeful.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You be scared and hopeful. I’ll be over here.”
They spent the rest of Friday, most of Saturday, and all of Sunday bunkered in the room. When the chambermaid poked her head in to make the daily towel exchange, it probably looked like a plainclothes cop guarding an informant before the big trial. When they weren’t eating, watching television, or appearing in the bathroom as “The Aristocrats,” you could find Mort asleep, which was a nice break from his ping-ponging disorientation and despair.
College Boy was stretched out on the other bed, rewriting the same three pages of Yale Club stationery. Both sides. He planned to bust out for an hour early Monday morning and air his work out on the radio. (“And now it’s time for a brand-new feature here on The Dan Drake Show: ‘Closing Arguments from The Dirt King…’”) The agonizing slowness of writing, or trying to write, or whatever the fuck he thought he was doing, was a glorious distraction from the notion of this old man he was obviously overmatched to care for, this name and persona he had outgrown to tatters (C. B.? C. B. Sussman? Is that really what we’re going with from now on?), this woman who was never a minute too early nor a second too late, who he was obviously overmatched to care for—Shit! He already used that analogy on the old man! Some fucking writer.
Sheila came by Saturday and Sunday afternoons. She sat in the hard-backed chair at the desk and restrained herself from straightening the place up or making any locker-room smell remarks. When Mort would drift off, she and College Boy headed into the refreshingly musty hallway, cracked the door, and walked the corridor trying not to get to know each other.
“Can I ask you a question, Sheila?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if I can ask you a question?”
“No. That’s my answer to your question.”
“Okay.”
“Fine.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“Ah—”
“If you had to guess….”
“I—”
“…because I won’t hold you to it.”
“Don’t—”
“Yes?”
“…know.”
“I should apologize.”
“For what?”
“I haven’t had to talk to too many people in the last few months, so I’m pretty incapable of conversation.”
“Well, this is as close as I come to glib.”
“So, you don’t mind this awkwardness between us?”
“Actually, I’d like a little more. I can’t remember the last time I was this uncomfortable.”
“You’re uncomfortable too?”
“Yes.”
“Great! Let’s see what else we have in common. What’s your favorite book?”
“Magister Ludi. No, no. The Microbe Hunters. No, wait. Henderson the Rain King. Hang on. The Easter Parade. No, fuck it. Anything by Lovecraft.”
“Let’s go back to awkward.”
“Okay.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“I said awkward.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Ah, I don’t know.”
Saturday night, the two of them roused Mort to where he was willing to be dressed and taken to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. They made it out of the Yale Club, across Vanderbilt Avenue to the top landing on that east-facing marble staircase just inside the entrance off the cab stand. A staircase built for overblown entrances. Saturday evening, seven P.M. Grand Central off-peak and humane. Yet Mort froze. And fast. The only thing moving were his tears. It had taken four minutes to get to the landing. It took almost thirty to get Mort back to the room, half of that Sheila calming him down to where College Boy could pick him up and carry him back across Vanderbilt with no threat of crumbling. Man, he’d gotten thin.
College Boy set him down across Forty-third Street, far enough from the entrance to the Yale Club where, if anyone had been there, no one would have paid attention. Sheila ensured the focus would be off Mort getting his sea legs back by walking way ahead of them, slowly, her chocolate suede trenchcoat opened to distraction. A move she had picked up from Barbara Bain, she would later tell College Boy.
During a time when everything was lost on Mort, the gestures made by these two to enable him to walk into the Yale Club unaided and unnoticed were not. They were still planning to leave him there to die, and now they’d enlisted a doctor, that sand trap Bedouin, Fing or Wing or whatever his changed name was. Of that he was still sure. But to be back in his bed, in his Chipp robe, waiting for room service, as if the world thought he’d gone out to pick up the New York Review of Books and a roll of pep-o-mint Life Savers and sauntered back, well, they were owed.
Sheila showed up Sunday afternoon around three o’clock. She brought the Hyundai or Honda in from Roosevelt Island and thought Mort might like to drive around Manhattan for an hour or so. Mort was not interested. But he thought it was a smashing idea for the two of them and began to push thusward. College Boy and Sheila took turns telling him no until five, when he said he wanted to watch the rest of the Doral Open alone and nap and they would be doing him a great favor if they would be so kind and get the hell out of his room until supper time. At five-fifteen, they withdrew their final protest.
“I’ll be honest, the last thing I want to do is go somewhere else and sit. Even if we’re moving.”
“Fine.”
“I feel like I haven’t stopped sitting since October.”
“You wearing sneakers?”
“Yeah.”
“Come with me, C. B.”
“Why did you call me that?”
“I can’t call you College Boy anymore. Can’t find him.”
“Okay.”
“Come on.”
She lied. They did get in the car, but it only took fifteen minutes to get over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and out to the end of Roosevelt Island and Serious Fitness, Inc.
They walked into the tiny gym. Five-thirty in March and already pitch black, as if they’d traveled two times zones rather than one borough. Sheila flicked the light over the two treadmills and tossed College Boy a shirt, shorts, and socks from the laundry she’d done for Q-Dog yesterday. “You can change in the incredibly dark room next to the shower.”
“Where are you going to change?”
“Already there.” Sheila opened her shirt and peeled it back with both hands to reveal the top of a leotard, reached inside her pants to yank up the elastic waistband
of what could only be gym shorts, then lifted her pant leg just enough to show a heavy white athletic sock. It was all done with great fake furtiveness, like some mild-mannered cleaning woman unveiling her true identity—calisthenic superhero.
College Boy emerged and saw Sheila adroitly stretching her quads and felt the rare mixture of arousal and sickness. The arousal was Sheila grabbing one of those legs, puffing that magnificent chest. He was 36. He wasn’t made of stone. The sickness was the realization that he would have to stretch.
Maybe he was made of stone. It had been a long time. So long, it might as well have been never. Even when stretching had been an agonizingly regular part of his life, when life for College Boy had turned into what happens between stretching, it was a sentence. A customized Dantean ring at the foot of Purgatory—inflexibility.
He tried the hamstrings first. “Jesus God.” After three separate attempts, he mumbled, “We’ll get back to those.” He tried the quad stretch, which used to be the least of his problems. “Good Christ.” He hung in, fueled by a growl that sounded like the last words of a Mr. Coffee machine (“Arrurghppppp…”). Sheila had finished with her calves and was in the middle of a long toe touch, trying not to laugh. But she wasn’t made of stone.
“Hey, Nick Nolte…” She knew.
And then College Boy began his lunges. The growl turned to a spitting Tourette-like skein of half-expletives (“Fu…bas…pri…shi-fu…fuuuuu…”), then to a soft plaintive wail, then finally to the high-pitched helpless titter of distress. “Why are you doing this? That’s enough. Enough. Somebody stop. Please. Please. Enough.” All of which wasn’t helped (Well sure, hence the word “helpless”) a few minutes later, when Sheila, fresh from fifty crunches, pulled up alongside him and growled, spat, cursed, and tittered in highlight reel fashion. With that, College Boy’s suspect infrastructure gave way.
“Let me know,” he puffed, “when it’s all too overwhelming for you.”
Sheila rolled over and laughed for a while. A while. Enough. Please. Somebody stop. Finally, she bounced up and started the treadmill. College Boy struggled to his knees. If I can do twenty push-ups, he thought, I’ll keep going.