You come out of it different each time. Fast or slow. Easy or so damn hard you want to be dead. Sometimes the pain is so massive, so everything that you feel it can no more come to an end than the universe itself. This is gonna be one of those times, I just know it. Drugs with a side of dildo? There is no way this is gonna be anything but a nightmare.
I feel myself surfacing and part of me is glad not to be dead but most of me wants to stay down here in the cool dark and have no network for a while, but my subconscious is running the show at the moment and picks up on some red flags that need my immediate attention, and so sends me surging toward consciousness like an oxygen-starved swimmer pulling for the surface.
I hear a screeching noise that could be a large bird, something from the Amazon maybe, and my body is being vigorously shaken. Am I riding some huge Amazonian bird? Could that be it? How has my life arrived at this point? I stop worrying about the bird when I realize that I can’t breathe. Imagine the panic our friend the oxygen-starved swimmer would feel if he broke the surface only to find no breathable air in the atmosphere. That is how I feel. Panic and pain are my motivators. How could I not have realized how happy I was back then, in the past, when I could breathe freely and there was no constant pain?
My eyelids open themselves, allowing my eyeballs to swell and bug out. No photos please. I am in the back of a car, which is skidding sideways toward a cowboy cushion on the freeway. The screeching is the protests of four melting tires that were not designed for lateral hops. There are two familiar-looking heads in the front and they are howling in panic, slapping at each other like kindergarten girls in a yard fight as if that can help. The side windows are filled with the elevated grille of the Hummer that has rammed us. I don’t even know who’s trying to kill me now. Probably everybody in both vehicles.
I do not give two shits about any of this. All I want to do is breathe. This is beyond a joke. Why can I not breathe?
I paw at my throat with handcuffed hands to find a seat belt cinched tight across my Adam’s apple.
It’s probably the belt across your windpipe that is stopping you breathing, genius.
And why am I handcuffed? Did Buttons handcuff me?
The belt is tight across my chest like a Band-Aid and I can’t get a finger under it, so now I have a dilemma: leave the belt on and suffocate, or take it off and be killed on impact. Is this Murphy’s Law or a Hobson’s choice or a Catch-22? I can never distinguish between those three. Murphy’s Law has something to do with potatoes, I’m pretty sure about that. If this run of bad luck continues, they might have to coin a phrase in my honor, posthumously of course.
Daniel’s Dilemma.
Catchy.
Got a ring to it.
Screw it. I have to breathe. My fingers crab down toward the safety buckle but the choice is taken from my hands when the car crashes into the impact barrel, smashing the barrel flatter than an unassembled coffee table, sending water seething through the cracks with enough force to fracture the side windows. The safety belt holds, but cuts through my clothing to the skin below. My shirt pocket bursts into flame and I cannot understand why until I remember the book of matches I keep in there to light the tipped cigars Zeb and I smoke to celebrate staying alive for another week. Is the matches’ flaring symbolic somehow? I am showered with glass and water, which is painful but at least the fire goes out. Every cloud as they say.
I am held in place by the belt but I still cannot bloody breathe. For feck sake. Gimme a bloody break. God, Buddha, Gandhi, Aslan. Whoever. I remember that I have hands when the body of the car settles on its buckled chassis and stops moving. I unsnap the buckle, slide across the seat and draw a greedy breath that feels like I’m swallowing glass, but I don’t care. My brain was seconds away from starvation and I do not have spare brain cells to lose. I breathe again, deeper, and feel my panic subsiding. Confusion quickly fills the vacuum.
What is happening?
What part of my life is this?
Am I in Ireland or the Lebanon or Jersey?
I do not know exactly who the guys in the front are but I imagine they were planning on doing me harm so I am glad to see that they are not moving, their heads enveloped by the mushroom sprawl of air bags. Maybe they didn’t survive. I think I am safe enough, conscience-wise, to hope that they didn’t.
So this is a rescue? Could that be it? My friends have grouped together, pooled their resources and come to save me.
Doubtful. Do I have friends? No one springs to mind. Something about Madonna and the Bee Gees.
Two dead now. Tragic, what a band.
There is a horrendous creaking of twisting metal as the Hummer backs up a few feet, taking the side door with it.
I hope this is a rental, I think unkindly. So those two bent cops will be hit with the bill.
Cops? They’re cops. I remember that now. Krieger and Fortz.
A shadow falls across me and I am relieved to see a human framed by a doorway that until recently had a door in it. I am relieved because the figure is human and not simian, though it is wearing an Obama mask.
Simian? Buttons. That couldn’t be real.
The figure moves quickly leaning in and grabbing fistfuls of my lapels.
My savior, I try to say but there is something hard in my mouth so I let it dribble onto my lap.
A tooth. One of my molars. All those years flossing, wasted. And I hate flossing too.
The guy is familiar.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” I say. Well you don’t want to be rude.
“This ain’t no fuckin’ rescue, retard,” says a familiar voice.
Freckles. I remember.
Friend or foe?
Foe. Most definitely.
I spit out a lump of bloody gum. “Freckles. I was rooting for you, dude.”
He drags me out of the car, gets up real close.
“Don’t call me Freckles,” he says. “My boss calls me Freckles and guess what? I am the boss now.”
It’s a reasonable request. “No problem. What do I call you?”
Freckles hustles me to the blacked-out Hummer. The freeway is quiet so it must be very late or very early. Regardless, it won’t take the blues more than a minute or two to get here and a bashed-up Hummer won’t be so hard to spot. I can see the Silvercup sign near the off-ramp. There can be only one.
“You can call me Mr. Toole.”
He has got to be joshing. “Your name is tool?”
Freckles hoists me so we’re nose to nose. “That’s right. Ben Toole.”
Sometimes you gotta laugh even though it could get you killed. “Bent Tool? Get the feck out. What is wrong with parents?”
Ben blushes with rage and his freckles disappear. “Ben . . . Toole. With an E.”
I am still not altogether together, if you know what I mean. My face feels like it’s been flayed, my body is for shit, but I think it’s important to keep the conversation going.
“Everyone knows there’s an E in Ben, Freckles. I’m not a fecking tool . . . No offense.”
Freckles jabs me in the solar plexus, which is probably doing some damage, but my pain levels are so off the scale that the blow doesn’t even register.
“The E is in Toole. At the end.”
I get it. “Oh, like O’Toole, without the O.”
This apparently is a vowel too far for Freckles because he howls with that particular anguish brought on by decades of taunting and bundles me into the back of the Hummer. I get an upside-down glimpse of the driver and it’s the kid: Shea.