Tom Schreck: On the Ropes

I went through the sliding doors of the ICU and there was Gabbibb with his stethoscope around his neck and a clipboard in his hand.

“Doofy.” Gabbibb’s big brown eyes grew wide. “Don’t tell me you were here visiting dee homosexual.”

“His name is Michael Osborne,” I said.

“I know dat,” Gabbibb said. He didn’t get it. “Shouldn’t you be catching up on dose files?”

I shook my head and started to walk away. I got about ten feet and I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey, Gabbibb,” I shouted.

He turned and looked down his nose and over his glasses at me.

“Go fuck yourself.”

I turned back around and headed out. All the way down the hallway I could hear it.

“DAT, DAT, DAT, DAT, shit… excuse me… DAT, DAT, DAT…”

The next set of sliding doors closed and the rest of the DATs faded into the rest of the hospital sounds.

I wound my way through the hospital corridors, looking for Rudy’s office. I’d been there a bunch of times but I can never find it easily. After a couple of wrong turns, I found him. Through the window I saw him at his computer with his belly causing maximum stress to the elastic waistline of his trousers and beads of sweat gathering on his forehead. The man was always sweating.

I let myself in and Rudy didn’t even look up from his computer.

“Hey, Rude, I-”

“Hang on.” His face cringed and he pounded a few more keys. “Sorry, Duff. I’m trying to get caught up.”

“Lot of that going around,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“Is Mikey going to make it?” I asked.

“Duff,” Rude exhaled heavily. “I ain’t going to bullshit you. It doesn’t look good. He might even be better off if he didn’t.”

“Are the cops involved?”

“Some detective talked to me in the ER. He didn’t seem all that energetic.” Rudy lifted his glasses off his nose and rested them on top of his balding head.

“I’m guessing the cops aren’t going to sweat the assault of a guy who spent his life in the bushes of Jefferson Park.”

“Probably not,” Rudy added. He was about to say something else when his beeper went off. “It’s the ER, I gotta run.”

I got out of the way. Rudy ran past me, and with the weight he carried, there was likely to be a second code blue if he continued to run. He disappeared down the stairs and I headed to the elevator.

I was walking through the ER to get to the parking lot, and there was some sort of crisis going on. Rudy was yelling, they had that cart with the paddles, and they were working over someone on the floor. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

They started to move the guy onto a gurney and a nurse was holding a clear bag that was connected to a tube that was running to the guy on the table. They had an oxygen mask on him, and I could see that Rudy had blood splattered all down the front of his white shirt and tie. I heard something yelled about surgery and they ran the gurney down the hall.

Rudy wiped the sweat from his brow and picked up the phone on the triage desk. He hung up angrily and barked orders at the nurses. He took a deep breath and looked up and saw me.

“Duffy,” he was breathing hard. “That was another one of your guys. That was Eli.”

It had been a hell of a twenty-four hours. I had drunk myself to sleep last night with Walanda’s death on my mind. There was also the question of what, if anything, I could do to find Shony. Then Mikey, then Eli-getting hit in the nads by Al and stepping barefoot in shit was the highlight of the day. The karma or whatever drives the world was getting really fucked up. I mean, these folks weren’t exactly on top of things before this shit storm blew into them. I just didn’t get it.

I got to the Moody Blue and cracked open a Schlitz. I hit the answering machine and there were a couple of messages. The first was Smitty again, and he had news that the promoter in Kentucky had sweetened the purse to seven grand. He also found out more about the opponent and that he was 15 and 0 with fifteen knockouts, all coming in three rounds or less. Smitty said the guy was being groomed for a title shot, and from the videos he’d seen, the guy could really swat.

The second was from Lisa. She was forcing back tears and I could tell it wasn’t going to be good news.

“Duffy, I’ve been thinking.” She sniffed through the tears. “I hate to do this on the phone, but I just can’t bring myself to do it in person.”

I think I knew how this was going to go.

“… I haven’t told you, but I’ve been seeing a therapist. She thinks that now isn’t the right time for me to be in a relationship. She also thinks that you’re an archetype of my relationship with my father and that I’m re-creating dysfunctional patterns,” she said.

Maybe I didn’t know how this was going to go. This was thicker bullshit than even I was used to from women.

“… The fact of the matter is that though you and I had fun together and seemed to care for each other, it wasn’t on a deep enough plane. My therapist says I need more intimacy and that’s impossible with a man like you…”

Oh geez…

“I also have begun to explore myself, and my therapist thinks that I may have a better chance of exploring intimacy with other women…”

I definitely didn’t know how this was going to go.

“… So I’m going to explore some lifestyle changes… I’m glad I got this out. My therapist says it’s important for me to be assertive and direct. Please don’t call me, Duff, not for a while. I need time to think. Then maybe we could work on being friends.”

I’m so glad she was assertive enough to call my machine and let me know about her lesbianism. I’ve lost a lot of relationships, but never have they cooked up the lesbian card to bail. Ah, the satisfaction of another relationship milestone.

As for the being friends thing, that was my absolute favorite. Somehow women felt that that absolved them from the guilt of ripping out your heart and treating it like a pig that was slated for sausagedom. Then they can keep you around like some emotional tampon that they can insert once a month when they’re lonely and whoever they were most recently fucking dumps them.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I called Smitty to find out about the fight. Smitty stayed up most of the night reading, so I never worried about waking him. He was never what you’d call chatty, but on the phone he was even less so. He picked up on the first ring.

“Yeah…” That was his usual greeting.

“You know, you really ought to work on being more engaging.”

“You want to fight or not? The fight is this Saturday. That gives you three days,” Smitty said.

“Yeah, that’s all right. I kind of feel like fighting,” I said.

“Duffy, this boy is no joke.” Smitty’s voice was serious. “He can hit and you’ll have to be sharp.”

“I’m always sharp, Smitty-you know that.”

“I ain’t playin’, Duff,” he said.

Smitty gave me the particulars about the opponent, the travel schedule, and the other logistical stuff I needed to know about the fight. The guy I was fighting was named Tommy Roy Suggs. We were going to fly Friday after work, which was good considering how things in the office had been going. It probably wasn’t going to be a great time to ask for a day off. The fact that they raised my purse and were allowing us to fly meant they really wanted their boy and me to get it on. I was looking forward to fighting and the cash would be nice too.

I was in decent shape, not great shape, but decent enough to fight. In my line of work as a short-notice fighter, I can’t afford to ever get out of shape. Matchmakers liked me because I would take the fights when they needed somebody in a hurry and no one else was saying yes. It was something I accepted, but I never actually got used to it. Managing my emotions over the next three days would be hell.