The One-Eyed Man Page 17

  In my earpiece I heard the producer. “France, back to you in three, two, one …”

  “Megan McAdams, former director of BADD, Babes Against Drunk Driving,” Finesse said. The screen behind the camera was now bisected between Finesse and a woman, presumably Megan, sitting in a studio elsewhere.

  “Megan,” Finesse continued, “so she still had three Jell-O shots stuffed in her pockets. Do you know what her blood alcohol was, Megan?”

  “It was twice the legal limit, Francy,” the woman said, her face a pinch of stern disapproval. “It was about .18.”

  “Obviously we’re not sure how many drinks she had had, but it was a lot,” Finesse said. “I know that this was a Saturday night. It was around two A.M. Allegedly, there was a babysitter with her three children. I can’t confirm that. She had picked up some guy at a bar. She was driving his car. She gave the cops a fake name, gave the friend a fake name, and still had three Jell-O shots in her hoodie. I guess, what, Megan, was she just going to drink those at booking?”

  Megan, evidently devoid of a sense of humor, at least when it came to drunk driving, showed no sign of appreciating Finesse’s sarcasm. “Absolutely, Francy. What she was planning to do is just slingshot them as soon as she got an opportunity. And Francy, again, what happens is her blood alcohol might have been a little bit lower when they tested her the first time. But if she had actually taken those last three Jell-O shots, that would be the equivalent of another three full drinks, so her blood alcohol would have gone through the roof, given another hour.”

  “Would have,” I said.

  “How’s that?” Megan asked.

  “Well you keep saying she would have taken the Jell-O shots as though she did, in fact, take the Jell-O shots. But she didn’t. You’re just sensationalizing what was, in fact, a routine drunk-driving arrest, the kind that happens thousands of times a day all over the country.”

  “But this woman has children,” Megan said.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “So what?” Megan echoed.

  “Were they in the car?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” Megan said. “But people drive drunk with their children in the car all the time.”

  “But this woman did not,” I said.

  “Not this time.”

  “Then how is the fact that she has three children at all relevant?” I asked.

  Under the table, Finesse’s stiletto heel dug into my shin. “Dan O’Donnell, anchor joining me from WIPN,” she said. “Dan, isn’t it true that when she was arrested she immediately blurted out to police she already had five DUI arrests?”

  On the screen behind the camera a bald man in a gray suit appeared, holding a microphone. “Yes, she did,” the man said. “And a subsequent check of her record revealed that it was only three DUI arrests. But she was already—”

  Finesse cut him off. “Did you just say only three DUI arrests? As if that’s not bad enough? Okay. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, Dan O’Donnell. Go ahead.”

  Wilted by Finesse’s scorn, Dan offered a sputtering chuckle. “Yes, I guess so, Francy. That is obviously terrible, especially when you consider that’s one DUI arrest for every young child she has at home.”

  “Again with the children,” I said.

  “She was also arrested and convicted of carrying an illegal firearm about five years ago,” Dan continued, “and is now charged with a couple of felonies, Francy, for this latest DUI.”

  Armed with this information, Finesse really hit her stride. “Okay, so Mommy has Jell-O shots stuffed down her hoodie pockets. She’s blowing a .18 and she’s got a concealed weapon.”

  “He said the firearms charge was five years ago,” I said.

  Finesse turned to me. “What,” she said, “is your point?”

  “Just that she wasn’t carrying a gun on the night in question, the way you’re trying to make it seem. Also, no one said anything about it being concealed. The words he used were ‘illegal firearm.’”

  Finesse stared at me.

  “I’m just saying,” I said.

  “France?” the producer said into our earpieces.

  I noticed that my hands had started to tremble. I held them up in front of my face, and without looking away from the camera Finesse reached over and shoved them back down to the table.

  “So tell me, Dan,” Finesse said, “a Jell-O shot. What is it?”

  “Made like regular Jell-O or gelatin, Francy,” Dan said. “It’s very similar.”

  “Well, it’s not ‘similar,’” I said. “It is, in fact, the same.”

  After a pause, Dan continued. “So you take Jell-O, you take boiling water, but the difference is instead of adding ice cubes or chilled water to set the Jell-O, you use chilled liquor, normally vodka. Now, vodka doesn’t have a lot of taste on its own, so when you’re drinking this or swallowing it down, it tastes like a Jell-O cube. But boy, are they deadly because that alcohol really sneaks up on you.”

  “I assume,” I said, “that you’re using the word ‘deadly’ in a figurative sense.”

  “Well … yes,” Dan said. “But I suppose they could be literally deadly, too. If you ate enough of them.”

  “And we still seem to be ignoring the fact that this woman did not actually consume the Jell-O shots,” I said.

  Globules of sweat begin to sprout just above my eyebrows. The trembling worsened, accompanied now by a nauseous fluttering in my gut.

  Finesse jumped in again. “Okay, so how much alcohol, Megan McAdams, is in a Jell-O shot?”

  “Oh, honey, it can be ounces,” Megan said, shaking her head. “And again, if you’re taking it so quickly, it gets into your system immediately. It’s not like nursing a drink over, you know, fifteen or twenty minutes walking around at a party. You’re taking it instantly. So with those three, she would have had the equivalent of three full drinks in her within fifteen seconds.”

  “Except that she didn’t actually eat them,” I said. “Please forgive me if you’re tired of hearing that. But basically what we’re doing here is a Wikipedia article about Jell-O shots. It’s not a news item. Because we’re not discussing what actually happened. I mean, while we’re at it, why don’t we talk about how she stole an Abrams tank from the local armory and drove it through a super Walmart? That didn’t happen either, but it sure sounds interesting.”

  Finesse turned to me again, slowly, like a horror-film zombie, her face locked in a testes-shriveling scowl. I thought, though I could not be sure, that I heard Dan O’Donnell snicker in my earpiece.

  “France,” the producer said. “Let’s get this under control.”

  Finesse seared me for a second longer with her gaze, then turned again to face the camera. “Okay, everybody,” she said, “you’re seeing a shot right there of Missy Ramirez, twenty-eight years old, three children. She says she has five previous DUIs.”

  “But it was actually—”

  Finesse cut me off. “She had the Jell-O shots still stuck down her shirt when police arrested her. And Megan McAdams, for every time a DUI person is apprehended, what is the estimate of how many times they’ve driven drunk?”

  “About thirty, Francy,” Megan said. “She has driven drunk almost every time she’s ever been in a car because each time she should have gotten a DUI, she just wasn’t caught that day. But having five and already losing her license—”

  “She had three DUIs, not five!” I hollered. I was as surprised as anyone at the outburst, but helpless, suddenly, to stop myself. “Why is that so hard to acknowledge, Megan? Why do you continue to insist on saying things that everyone, you included, knows are not true? She’s been drunk almost every time she’s ever been in a car? Is that what you’re saying, Megan? Is that what you’re trying to convince everyone of? Is that what we’re all supposed to just sit here and accept without question, despite the fact that we all know it’s utter nonsense?”

  By now my entire body was trembling, and I felt sick on a cellular level.

  “Okay
so we’re going to go to commercial,” the producer said in my earpiece.

  “Or actually,” I said, “we’re not supposed to merely accept it. Right? We’re supposed to get good and agitated over the whole thing. Supposed to work ourselves up into a proper froth. We’re supposed to say: Five DUIs? What an outrage! And those poor kids! What is the world coming to? We’re supposed to despair and grind our teeth as though this woman is emblematic of the entire culture, a whole nation driving around gulping Jell-O shots and playing slalom on the highway with their kids unbelted in the back.”

  “France,” the producer said, “pretty much whatever you need to do to shut him up.”

  “And let’s not overlook the fairly obvious racist subtext here,” I said. “I mean it’s not an accident that of all the thousands of drunk-driving arrests in the past week, you chose to highlight one featuring a woman whose last name is Ramirez, a woman who looks very, very Hispanic in that photo you keep putting up on the screen. Your audience is probably, what, eighty percent white? Eighty-five?”

  “I will throw you directly out of this studio, buster,” Finesse said.

  The discomfort in my stomach had migrated north, and now felt like someone squeezing my heart in their fist. Something hot and acrid rose into my throat, and I swallowed it back down with a full-body gulp that no doubt registered on camera.

  “I mean, you’ve got some nerve coming on here and calling me a racist,” Finesse said. “You know how many segments I’ve done on police brutality against blacks?”

  On the screen in front of us, Megan looked as though she might start crying.

  “To be clear, I’m not calling you a racist,” I said, trying to calm myself. “I’m merely saying that there’s something to be gained by providing your white audience with confirmation of their greatest fear: that America, which in their mind rightly belongs to them, is being overrun by godless subhuman mud people who speak languages other than English.”

  Finesse slammed both hands on the table, hard enough that I startled. “That’s it,” she said. “Hit the road, Jack.”

  “Yes, probably that’s best,” I said. “I’m feeling a little faint, at the moment.”

  She stared at me. “So get the fuck out of here, already,” she said, making a shooing motion with one hand.

  I stood and removed the microphone from my lapel. “You can say ‘fuck’?” I asked.

  “I can say whatever I goddamn please,” Finesse said.

  My right knee tried to buckle, and I pressed my palms against the tabletop to keep from falling. “But technically you’re forbidden from using profanity, correct?” I asked Finesse. “Per FCC regulations?”

  “The FCC, idiot,” Finesse said, “will only levy a fine if you use words that describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. I used the word ‘fuck’ as an adjective in a way that could not at all be construed as a sexual reference.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “You think I don’t know my shit?”

  “It would be difficult,” I said, “to argue that ‘shit’ is anything but excretory.”

  Finesse stared at me once more, her gaze so steady and piercing I half expected to see hypnotic cartoon swirls form in her eyes. “Get. Off. My. Set,” she said.

  “I would like nothing more,” I told her. “But I’m very weak, all of a sudden, and if I let go of the table I think there’s a good chance I’ll collapse.”

  I heard the producer cut in again over my earpiece, which I’d neglected to remove along with the microphone. “We really, really need to get to commercial, France,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, announce the next segment.”

  Finesse paused for a moment, took a deep breath, gave her head a brisk steadying shake, and resumed her righteous camera glare. “Coming up next,” she said, “in South Carolina, a man sets his wife on fire, then claims it was all just a simple barbecuing accident.”

  • • •

  Claire took one look at my face as I stumbled off set and said, “We’re going to the hospital.”

  I didn’t think that was necessary, but I also wasn’t inclined to argue with her. She held on to my arm and guided me to the elevator. When we reached the ground floor we discovered that, not surprisingly, the car service provided by the show had dematerialized, so I slumped against a parking sign while Claire hailed a cab, and soon enough we found ourselves in the emergency room of New York-Presbyterian.

  It turns out chest pains are a very good way to circumvent the long ER waits one encounters with, say, a broken arm or scalp laceration. The moment I told the triage nurse my primary complaint, I was whisked to an examination room and given a baby aspirin, which I dutifully swallowed.

  “That was fast,” I said to the nurse.

  “We don’t play around with chest discomfort,” she told me. “Especially in men over forty.”

  “I’m thirty-nine,” I told her.

  “If you could take off your clothes, please, and put this on.” She held out a thin cotton johnny with two sets of tie strings in the back.

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “I’ve always thought the only purpose of the hospital johnny was to infantilize the patient, thus making him unquestioningly compliant.”

  “If you could just put it on,” the nurse said. “It’s standard procedure.”

  “For cardiac events?” I asked.

  “For everything,” the nurse said.

  “Do you anticipate, with the symptoms I’m presenting, a need for emergency access to my scrotum or anus?” I asked.

  “I don’t know all your symptoms yet.”

  “It’s just the chest pain,” I said. “And my hands have been shaking. There is absolutely nothing abnormal happening below my waist.”

  “In that case,” the nurse said, “we most likely won’t need emergency access to your scrotum or anus.”

  “Then the only reason you could want me to wear a see-through miniskirt that opens in the back is humiliation,” I said. “Which is probably not good for my health, long term. There’s a lot of evidence indicating negative emotions can affect the body. Even cause heart attacks.”

  “Suit yourself,” the nurse said. “But be aware that if we do suddenly need access to your scrotum or anus, we will cut the pants right off of you. Your shirt, on the other hand, has to come off now. That’s nonnegotiable.”

  The nurse left while I unbuttoned my oxford.

  “I like her,” Claire said. “Sassy.”

  “I can’t seem to help rubbing people the wrong way,” I said.

  “She took it well. Better than most. How are you feeling?”

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  Claire put a hand against my cheek. “Somewhat south of great, my love,” she said. “Though not quite so pale anymore.”

  A few seconds later another woman came in, pushing an EKG machine before her. While she was setting up, the first nurse returned and took a blood sample with such skill that I literally felt nothing. Then the nurse helped the technician attach electrodes to my chest and back. Within a few minutes the machine was steadily scrolling out paper, as well as displaying my heart rhythm in real time on a monitor.

  “Ticker tape,” Claire said, watching.

  The nurse snorted.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “It’s a pun, dum-dum,” Claire said. “Ticker tape. Get it?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.

  Claire sighed, then turned to the technician. “How’s it look?”

  The technician continued to gaze at the monitor. “Hard to say, just yet,” she said.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “If you must,” the technician said.

  “Why is it abbreviated EKG, when it stands for electrocardiogram? Shouldn’t it be ECG?”

  “Often it’s written as ECG, these days,” the technician said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question, though,” I said.

  “I’m going to ne
ed you to be quiet, sir,” the technician said.

  “I just realized something,” the nurse said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You’re that guy,” she said.

  “I get that a lot.”

  “On TV. That new show.”

  “Yes. In fact, I was on television just tonight when this started happening.”

  “What new show?” the technician asked.

  “You guys mind if I have a nip?” Claire asked, pulling a pewter flask from her purse and holding it up for inspection. Both the nurse, suddenly fascinated by the presence of a bona fide television star, and the technician, absorbed in deciphering the EKG, ignored her. Claire shrugged, removed the cap, and tilted the flask to her mouth.

  “That show,” the nurse said to the technician. “He travels around and gets beat up. It’s a reality thing.”

  “Well, there’s more to it than that,” I said. “At least, we intend for there to be. A lot of the footage of me not getting beaten up is excluded from the program.”

  For the first time the technician looked away from the monitor. She peered at my face, squinted. “No kidding, it is you,” she said after a moment.

  “She’s on the show, too,” I said, pointing to Claire.

  “Can we get an autograph when we’re finished?” the nurse asked.

  “You can get one now,” I said.

  By the time I’d signed two emesis basins, the EKG had finished eavesdropping on my heart.

  “So will this be on the show?” the nurse asked.

  “Hard to say,” I told her. “It likely will depend on whether or not your machine indicates that I’m dying.”

  “Sadly, no,” the technician said. “Looks pretty good to me. But the cardiologist will want to have a closer look.”

  “You could always just kick me, then,” I said. “That pretty much guarantees footage will make the cut.”

  “I’m not sure my boss would like that.”

  Claire waggled her flask in the air in front of her. “Will it take long for the doctor to show up?” she asked. “This thing’s just about empty.”

  “He has to stay for eight hours anyway,” the nurse said. “We need to test him for cardiac enzymes, and they take a while to enter the bloodstream.”