Down to Zero

"Oh the feeling
When you're reeling
You step lightly thinking you're number one
Down to zero with a word
Leaving
For another one

Now you walk with your feet
Back on the ground
Down to the ground
Down to the ground."

My wife and I have been spending a lot of time recently watching "Homicide: Life on the Street". It's a police procedural-- well, it's a lot more than that-- that was filmed in Baltimore, and Fells Point, from 1993-1999, and it was one of my favorite shows on television when I was in middle and high school. There's a picture of me, somewhere, standing in front of the building that was used as the headquarters, in Fells Point-- and I'm grinning in that picture about as big as I can.

I can remember well watching Pembleton, who made suspenders look cool, scream a confession out of some moke in The Box, or Bayliss going through some existential crisis, or Munch never doing any actual police work-- just cracking wise, or paranoid. I can remember the brilliant Yaphet Kotto astonishing with his performance as Al Giardello, expertly towing the line between rabid attack dog and sensitive mentor. I can remember watching this show in 1998 when I decided to enter college as a theatre major, but I can remember watching "Homicide" in my parents' basement dreaming not of becoming an actor, but becoming a cop.

Instead, I became a father. I wrote a book about cops. I appear in local theatre plays. And, in 2011, I'm still watching "Homicide", with my best friend beside me on the couch-- and she loves it-- while she breastfeeds our twins, or pumps.

The song lyrics at the beginning of this blog are from the Joan Armatrading song "Down to Zero". The song plays at the end of the Season 5 episode of "Homicide" called "Prison Riot". I love Joan Armatrading's voice. It's a lot like Tracy Chapman's, and it's frequently confused for hers, but there's an earthier quality, a more impassioned fervor to Armatrading's voice. Something. If I knew more about music, or anything, maybe I could tell you what it is, but I don't know.

The older I get, the more I realize that there's a lot I don't know.

Life's funny. On December 15th, my twins were born. I didn't get to cut the cords, because the O.R. was way too chaotic, and my son came out white as a hospital wall. I was hurt, bummed-- diminished, I suppose might be a better way to describe it. My daughter had jaundice, my son had to have help to breathe, but we all went home together, and they grew, and we fell into a new routine, of feeding, and pumping, and watching Kay Howard, Meldrick Lewis, Mikey Kellerman, John Munch, Tim Bayliss, Frank Pembleton slug their way through another shift on the dirty streets of Bal'more.

Maybe four days after we got home with the twins, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage 4. Metastases in his stomach, his liver, his brain. Multiple masses in the brain, including one that was so huge it was growing even while he was hospitalized. A mass that's 9 centimeters in his chest. He's lost thirty pounds in no time at all.

No time at all. Down to zero.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

I was reminded, in thinking of all this, of the story of a young New York City patrolman who, on one particular shift in the early 1970s, shot and killed a suspect who had pulled a gun on him, and, several hours into the same shift, delivered a baby. That's how fucked up life is-- that these things happen like that. That life can come in and go out so soon, so close. My brother-in-law's life has not gone out, but it feels as though it is on its way out, as the lives of my children begin.

And what's to be done? My mother-in-law wants to send them lasagna, and cookies. She wants to festoon my nephew's room and life with an abundance of toys to make up for the fact that his father won't see much of 2012, let alone 2013. People want to clean their house and hold beef-n-beer benefits. People want to pay their bills, and I guess I hope they do. Me? I don't know what I want to do. It sounds cruel, but I have two children to raise and provide for, and I don't know how to do that, and I feel like I've got to start figuring that out. I never figured me out, and I guess that's going to have to wait until, I don't know-- retirement?

Maybe.

In the meantime, I'll be changing diapers, and receiving more bad news texts from my sister, and watching "Homicide" with my wife while our twins snore on our chests.

Since news of my brother-in-law's ill health broke on New Year's Day, I know now what Joan Armatrading is singing about, about being down to zero-- at the beginning, or at the end, it barely makes a difference. Sleep-deprived, half-psychotic, half-dreaming, in love, in mourning, in despair, infatuated, indefinable.

Down to the ground,
Down to the ground.

Homesick

There are dogs here that I am neglecting, at present.

There is a veritable trove of slightly off-beat films that I haven't watched in years, beckoning to be rediscovered.

There is ceaseless universe of reverse-cowgirl streaming internet pornography.

There is a gigantic, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf positively littered with all manner of literary offerings.

There is a smart phone and a computer and music on radios in the living room and in the kitchen.

There is dusty banjo that could be tuned at a moment's notice, resigned, though, to its fate, leaning helplessly against the window air-conditioning unit in the office.

There is tomato soup in the refrigerator. In all fairness, I'll probably get to that later.

I have to say that I'm more than a bit overwhelmed when I think of all the things I could be doing while at home, sick. If I'm honest with you, I may have been neglecting the books on the shelf, but I did manage to get another sixty-seven pages into Mark Twain's Autobiography, Volume 1. Still, it barely seems like I've made a dent, and his language and his wit are challenging to fathom when your brain feels like it is encased inside some sort of ghoulish Jell-O mold-- which it pretty much is, if you think about it.

I had to put the book down, though, because I am at the part where he is speaking of his daughter, Susy, who died of spinal meningitis when she was 24 years and five months old. And I just can't an elderly father's reminiscenses of his long-lost daughter when I'm not feeling well. It is too much.

On Tuesday, I had every intention of going into work Wednesday, even though I had been feeling ill all afternoon. I laid out my clothes for the next day, I made my lunch, I even put old clothes of ours in a paper bag marked "Donations" for the patients, and set it by the front door so I wouldn't forget it. But, after several hours of thrashing around in bed, simultaneously overheating and freezing to death, my sore throat making swallowing a very undesirable task, I leaned over, at 2:12am, and tapped Mrs. Apron on the shoulder. She jerked her head up, and hit me below the right eye-socket with her head.

"Ow!" I exclaimed.

"What is it?" She demanded.

"I have to call out for tomorrow," I replied hazily.

"Ok," she said, shmushing her head back down into her pillow. I got out of bed and turned on my BlackBerry. It made a ding that indicated some idiot had commented on a Facebook thread that I had commented on, about the movie "In Bruges," which seemed wholly irrelevant and annoying to me at 2:12am. I told the night nurse I was not coming in, and, for good measure, I texted my supervisor, and went back to bed.

Note: I went back to bed, not back to sleep.

There was no sleeping-- not for me, and not for Mrs. Apron. There was thrashing and tossing and the burying of heads beneath pillows and there was dog in between my legs, behind me, resting on my bladder. There was one point in the night where Molly had positioned herself so that she was dead center on my side of the bed, forcing my legs to dangle off the side of the bed, and I stayed like that for probably forty-five minutes, until my bare feet couldn't take the cold anymore. It was one of the worst nights I've passed in a while.

The day hasn't been much better. As a child, I can remember relishing being home sick from school. I stayed in bed all day and I loved it. As a thirty-year-old, I cannot stay in bed. Or in the office chair. Or on the sofa. Or anywhere, for any length of time. There is nothing to do, or at least there is the perception that there is nothing to do, which is powerful enough, and there is nothing in particular that I want to do. Sure, I'm blogging, but that is perfunctory and obligatory-- I'm not getting very much enjoyment out of it right now, sorry to say. The present experience certainly pales in comparison to the times when I stayed home from school as a little boy and took my meals in bed while watching "The Price is Right" on the little white TV brought into my room from the kitchen by my mother.

Just fifteen minutes ago, I actually threw a load of laundry into the wash, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. We'll see if I remember to put it into the dryer, and then if I forget it in the dryer entirely.

The most frustrating thing, perhaps, about being home sick is that I am not enjoying not being at work. I had the day off on Tuesday, and I didn't enjoy that either. Therapy, the dentist, the rain, and then I got sick. I am wracked with guilt over calling out sick, I know my department is going to be short-staffed, I know people were counting on me to do things that I'm not there doing, and I am obsessing over whether I could have slogged myself in, whether I was really sick enough to warrant calling out-- after all, what exactly is the threshold, what are the benchmarks for determining if one is sick enough to call out? I felt much worse, at 2:12am when I called out than, frankly, I do now. But could I have known that when I made the decision to call out?

Life was much simpler when I was a child and my mother made the final determination of I was sick enough to stay home from school. Although I sometimes disagreed with her decision, I at least liked that it wasn't me who was making the call. Because I don't always trust myself. And I rarely enjoy myself.

Even when I'm home sick.

One Sick Weekend

Being sick for an entire weekend hardly seems like fair dealing-- unless I was John Wilkes Booth, Pol Pot or the creator of "Benson" in a previous life. Even if I was, I could understand maybe being zonked on the couch for a Friday night, or half of Saturday-- but the whole weekend? Come on.

I'm pretty emotionally fragile as I plod my disoriented way through this weekend. I pulled the final tissue from the box and I almost started to cry. Perhaps I'm menstruating. I don't think so, it's pretty clean down there. I know because I've been showering a lot to clear up my sinuses, but I'll bet I still don't smell too good. It's hard to smell like anything but sick when you're sick. At least I don't smell like Vicks Vap-o-Rub-- I don't use shit like that because it's nasty. I think linaments, balms and salves are things of a previous generation. It's hard to imagine someone who uses a bluetooth headset and polarized sunglasses rubbing some kind of foul smelling ointment that has the consistency of chicken fat all over his chest.

I'm not a good patient either. I regress heavily when I'm ill. How unfortunate for my wife. At least I haven't attempted to nurse. I require lots of hugs when I'm sick. Advil, Sudafed, Advair, Rhinocort and whatever the hell else I'm taking don't seem to do anything-- but the hugs are comforting and send my endorphins pinging around my innards in a very positive way.

It's amazing what sickness does to the body and to the mind. One minute I'm yanking out firmly entrenched weeds in our front "garden," and the next I'm flat-on-my-back useless. It's amazing, too, how it can make things like hugs seem like cancer curatives and things like pulling out the last tissue in a box seem like a nuclear catastrophe. Granted, you have to understand that, when I pulled out the final tissue in that box, I had a green goobity hanging down from my nose that was about as long as a BIC pen. Not to mention the ones that had adhered themselves lovingly to my shirtsleeve, pants, shoes.

You really forget what being sick is like when you're healthy. I guess this is why my boss could not understand why I could not help out with some miniscule, unimportant thing on Friday night.

"I doubt you're really sick," she said. "It's probably just the paint fumes in your house."

"I have a fever," I dryly retorted. "Is that from the paint fumes, too?"

"Oh, well, I don't know."

Right. You don't.

She's sixty-one and she works herself into oblivion because she's a martyr and loves to be regarded as the one-woman show who is capable of doing the impossible. When she gets sick she "just ignores it," which I have tried to convince her is a dubious medical practice.

"Well, I never get so sick that I can't DO," she said after I begged off the Friday night obligation.

Ah, I thought, but you should.

I guess it's difficult to blame healthy people for not understanding what it feels like to be sick. The cotton wool feeling in your ears, the brain-encased-in-jell-o sensation, the baseball bat to the kidneys, the baby sheep up the nose-- it's tricky business explaining this to someone who's in prime physical condition, bounding around doing this and doing that, and looking at you suspiciously as you cry over the last tissue in the box.