Shiv-a-Git

When I was an EMT, sometimes, I would have accidents in the ambulance. And I don't mean that I would pee myself. The patients did that frequently enough, and they were always kind enough to do it on the stretcher, which was easily disinfected.

What I mean, of course, is that, when piloting the ambulance, sometimes I would hit things. They were always inanimate things, and I only did it three times in a year-and-a-half of employment. I don't know if that's a lot or a little, as compared to the average American emergency medical technician, but, for a guy who'd never previously driven anything larger than a Dodge Caravan and who had received a bogus Emergency Vehicle Operator's Certificate without ever having driven an actual ambulance, I think three minor accidents in seventeen months isn't bad.

The first accident I had was while pulling into a Sunoco gas station. It was the end of an eight hour shift that, due to a long-distance transport, had turned into a ten hour shift. I was exhausted, and I lovingly kissed a concrete barrier with the side of the truck. Actually, you could say that I Frenched it more than kissed it. The body damage on 251 was, you know, noticeable. And I had to take pictures of it with a little throw-away camera and fill out an accident report, replete with diagrams and the police were called. The officer took a look at the barrier and at the truck and drove away.

"You don't want this reported and put on your license anyway," he said to me. He was right. How did he know?

The second accident I had was while transporting a terminally ill patient to her luxurious home in my old neighborhood so she could die surrounded by her family and her collection of vases. I was extremely flustered because I knew the address, had been down the street hundreds of times growing up, but, for some reason, I could not find her house. And gently, almost imperceptibly, the ambulance drifted over to the right as I peered out of the driver's side window squinting for the right house number when there was a BOOM!

"Oh, fuck," I groaned softly, but loud enough, apparently, for my partner in the back to hear.

"You okay," he said, "just keep drivin', man."

I had swiped a big, white moving truck with the large, black plastic side-view mirror on the passenger side of the ambulance. An hour later, after we'd finally found the lady's house, we pulled into a vacant lot and I inspected the damage I had done to the rearview mirror. There was a large, undeniable white scuff all over the black plastic backing of the mirror.

"Well," I sighed, "there goes this week's paycheck." I picked up the radio mic.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa-- what are you doing?" my partner, an enormous African-American with a gap between his two front teeth the size of a block of cheese, asked.

"I damaged the truck, so I've got to let them know."

"Hold on, hold on, hold on," he said to me. He ran his fingers over his eight trouser pockets, and then across the breast pockets of his uniform shirt. He smiled and he un-Velcro'd his right breast pocket and pulled out a Sharpie marker.

"I keep this on me for emergencies, just like this," he said. He undid the cap and carefully colored over the white scuff mark until it was completely concealed. Even I had to admit it was a pretty good job. Undetectable from three-or-so feet.

"Wow," I said.

"No shit wow," he affirmed, replacing the cap on the marker, which he then presented to me. "Here," he said, grinning, "you're gonna need this. And let me tell you something-- you're gonna have a tough fuckin' time in this world if you let shit like this get you down, you know what I'm sayin'?"

I smiled dejectedly as I accepted the marker. I did know what he was saying.

Not only am I afflicted with an unquenchable desire to announce the wrongs I commit to the world, but I care so desperately about what people think of me, and wouldn't it be nice, I often think, if I didn't care so much. About that. About anything. About everything. And then I think-- but, if I didn't: who would I be?

Who would I be if I took a drink? Who would I be if I were sometimes late for things? Who would I be if I weren't as self-deprecating or as embarrassed or as uptight?

Would I be me?

When I was in college, and for a year afterwards, I worked at an optical store with an 80+-year-old guy named Jim. Jim came into work every day wearing the same shit he'd had on since Nixon was popular, and he was racist and homophobic and old fashioned and cantankerous, and he called women "Cupcake" and "Dolly" and he didn't know what types of glasses we carried or how much lenses cost, and he frequently made mistakes when cutting jobs, but I loved him. Jim was quaint and Catholic and he detested profanity, though he used it sometimes, and he had lots of catchphrases, but my favorite one was, "You know, I gotta tell you that, at my age, somebody doesn't like me or somethin' I think or say: I really don't shiv-a-git."

And every time I find myself freaking out about what someone else thinks of me, I try my best to remember my old friend Jim, and how he seemed to have mastered the ancient art of shiv-a-git-ness. It's an attitude that I seem only able to admire from a considerable distance, and I was reminded of that when I last crashed an ambulance as an EMT in 2007. We had just moved into a new base and I hadn't quite figured out the dimensions of the truck as compared to the new garage and, when bringing 402 out of the ambulance bay for the start of our shift, I ran the entire driver's side against the edge of the garage door opening, ripping off shards of the garage bay and damaging the right side of the roof of the ambulance. Four of my coworkers, and my partner, were watching and applauded. It was our first day at the new base.

"Hey, somebody's gotta have the first accident," my partner said as he climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door, "I'm glad it was you."

I Spy with My Little Eye Something Beginning With "Fetish"

Sometimes, I try to legitimize my fetishes by insisting that they be referred to, in polite company, as "interests." Other times, I'm not so particular. Or polite.

They're fucking fetishes.

I'm sick and salacious and dirty and dotty and just plain nasty.

And I.

Have.

Fetishes.

The one we're going to chat about today, as you may have gleaned from the photograph above, is: the eyeglass fetish.

I can't stop buying eyeglasses. It doesn't matter that I only have one head and one pair of eyes. It doesn't matter that, unless you're Robert Stack in "Airplane!", you can only reasonably wear one pair of eyeglasses on your face at any given time.

None of this logic and rationality matters when you are fetish-stricken. It just doesn't matter. Because you're fucking dottier than a Dot Matrix printer.

I've wanted to wear glasses since I was in the third grade. I practically willed myself to need them, too. I don't quite know how it happened. In 1988, when I first decided I had to have (as an accessory) glasses, neither of my parents wore glasses, for near or distance, and neither did either of my sisters. But I knew, as a budding schdork, that I had to have some. And, when my eyesight didn't warrant them, I wore them anyway.

Actually, they weren't real glasses. They were red, plastic sunglasses that you'd buy at Thrift Drug for $2.99 and they had a Mickey Mouse sticker on each temple. I promptly removed both of those stickers, and I popped out the sunglass lenses with my thumbs, and I wore them to school.

"You look like even more of a fucking retard than before," Russell, the neighborhood sociopath said to me on Bus 30 the first morning I wore my new accessories. I didn't care. I wore them for three weeks until they broke on the playground after I was hit in the face with the tetherball. I wasn't playing, of course, just walking past. God only knows how long I would have worn them had they not retired themselves that day.

By some miracle, God decided to grant my wish for glasses two years later. In fifth grade, I got my eyesight tested at school and it was bad enough to warrant a trip to the optometrist. He was a shockingly old fellow with an appalling gut that was held firmly in place by a pair of brown, impossibly tight trousers. During my visit with him, he several times adjusted what I can only assume were his schnutz, and, even as a nine-year-old, I was alarmed. When he leaned in close to me to adjust the refractor, I couldn't help noticing that his breath smelled like he had been tossing an elephant's salad for three weeks.

"You're a very precocious young man," he observed about me, which, I have to say, was a damn sight nicer than anything I was observing about him.

I was overjoyed when he prescribed me glasses for distance vision, with the recommendation that I not wear them all the time, "lest you grow too dependent on them."

Like hell, I thought. I wore those fuckers to sleep the first night.

In 2000, I got hired at my first non-camp job. It was a small optical shop, and, as time went on, the manager and I became very close friends. He offered me as many frames and lenses as I wanted at or below cost-- sometimes free if it was near my birthday. And, Jesus, did I take advantage of the discounts. I must have purchased seven or eight pairs directly from him, both while I worked there and for years afterward. And, though I left in 2003 (on the very best of terms) and even though I continue to buy whatever frame strikes my fancy at an antique shop or a flea market, I still go to him to have the lenses put in. He never makes me feel like a weirdo or a freak, even though I'm both. He just smiles and orders the lenses and cuts the job.

And, ever the salesman, never fails to tell me how nice I look in whatever the new pair happens to be.

I can't wait to get lenses put in these antique bad boys. And, who knows-- it might even be close enough to my birthday that he'll do it for nothing.

You'll Be Fine

A few long years ago, I was working at a small optical shop, selling glasses, scheduling doctor's appointments, throwing out the garbage, and laughing behind the backs of customers with my boss.

Then I got this crazy idea into my head that I was going to become a cop. So I wrote my boss a letter saying that I was going to resign from my $10.55/hr job to enter a municipal police academy as a police officer candidate. I was surprised when he didn't tell me that I was fucking crazy, because that's what my parents told me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said how proud he was of me, which is just what I wanted to hear from my parents about this decision, but didn't. And then he said something that rubbed me the wrong way, even though I think it was meant as a compliment.

"You'll be fine," he said to me.

"Look, you know it doesn't really matter what happens to you in there-- if you make it or if you wash out. You're handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious-- and you're a white male. Opportunities are just going to fall into your lap. I mean, shit: they fell into mine."

And I guess they did, for him. He grew up dirt-poor in a trailer in a shitty part of New Jersey. His father died early and his mother, still living, is a trembling, alcoholic wreck. Miraculously, my boss survived a long-haired, drug-hazed adolescence filled with unprotected sex and behavior of a dubious nature at best. He bummed around life and held a series of odd jobs-- landscaping, construction, house painting, and being a traveling soda vendor. A friend approached him and suggested he ought to stop peddling suds and start peddling sunglasses, and so he became a rep for a recognizable sunglass line. Another friend suggested that he buy an optical shop and, when the opportunity presented itself, as it invariably does to all handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white males, he did.

And, when he saw another handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white male at the age of twenty come into his shop with a quick joke and a shaky handshake, well, I guess he decided to return the favor. Well, kind of. He started me at $6.50 an hour, and my first job was to soap, rinse and dust each one of the approximately 2,000 pair of glasses that surrounded the store. It took me the entirety of my first week of work.

I was annoyed by my boss's assumption that things would turn out okay for me because of the color of my skin, or because I knew how to comb my hair or because I used uncommon vocabulary words like "effecacious" and "remuneration" in daily conversation. Were any of these facts sturdy enough to act as a cushion or a safety-net against homelessness, mental illness, depletion of cash, unemployment, accidents, or the hopeless, unstoppable failure that radically alters so many a promising life?

As we all know, my good looks and charming personality were not enough to keep me enrolled in the police academy. I left after two days, forty-eight minutes-- despite an acceptable sit-and-reach score, and a blistering mile-and-a-half run time. I soon learned that my combed hair or my impressive vocabulary was no help when it came time to lift the barbell.

Neither of these elements of who I am stopped me from seven months of unemployment, and they didn't help me the first time I tried to pass the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's EMT Practical Examination. Fortunately, I passed on the second try, and that lead to a year and seven months on the street with a transport ambulance company, alternately freezing or sweating my ass off for $11.00/hr, transporting spindly, 90-pound cancer sufferers to hospitals and hospice centers, or schlepping around 400-pound gorillas to MRI appointments or up three flights of stairs. Or down. I can't remember which anymore.

Promotions at the ambulance company that seemed like they would be open to someone of my liberal arts qualities-- positions in management or supervision-- were routinely given to others with lower education levels, lower communication skills, and probably lower chromosomal quantities.

So I left.

After two years in my current desk-jockey job, I am emotionally exhausted, burned out and apathetic, and I am, at 29, finding myself once again at a cross-roads in my life where I am wondering if what my old boss once said to me will turn out to be true or false.

"You'll be fine."

I never put much stock into what he said, unless it was funny, and I'm not sure I believe him now. I want to, of course. But I think he might have been prejudiced, and it's hard to believe what tainted people say.

If he is to be believed, though, and if I understand him correctly, some tantalizing plum will kind of just... fall into my lap. I just hope that, if it does, it doesn't break my balls.