A Sure Thing
I'm not a perfect man…I never claimed to be…
I've got a few bad habits, but who doesn't? In this world we live in full of instant gratification and unspeakable violence, there are bound to be people that have problems.
I'm one of them.
When I met my wife, Gloria, I thought that I had found everything I wanted in another human being, everything I needed. I had often felt like an outcast in the world, always burying my head in books, never looking up except to indulge myself in my addiction.
She understood everything I was going through. I grew up poor. I didn't have a chance to pay for college and surgeons can't start practicing without a degree, can they? That's why I studied so hard. I didn't have a social life, but I didn't want one either.
Gloria understood.
I saved up for so long to take her to see that opera. The one about that clown…That's where I proposed to her. She loved the opera. She loved finer things altogether, but she gave it all up to be with me. I loved her with my whole heart…I just never shared my addiction with her. I didn't want her to think any less of me than was entirely necessary.
I bought the record for that opera after the wedding…It was so special to me because I didn't even watch the opera that night. I watched Gloria. I watched her eyes transfixed on that depressed clown singing onstage. The whole opera just seemed to be a soundtrack to her devastating beauty. Whenever I listened to the record, I could see her. She was right before me with those pouty lips and those huge blue eyes and that long, curly auburn hair. She was right there.
When she finally did find out about my addiction, it would be an understatement to say she wasn't pleased. I had set up a small practice in the city. I was making a pretty good amount of money. Nothing fancy, but we had enough to not worry about going hungry. That's when she found out about my addiction to gambling.
She didn't want me throwing away all the hard-earned money on…well, nothing really. After all the bets, I really had nothing to show for it.
After the endless barrage of fights over my problem, she finally made me promise that I would give it up for good.
She was pregnant and wanted to save ever spare dime we made to give this baby a chance at a great life. She told me that her parents (they were never thrilled about our marriage) offered to take her in and shower her and their grandchild with the riches that she had turned her back on when she married me.
In my heart of hearts, I knew it was best for her to go and live back with them, but I couldn't very well just let the love of my life leave me, could I?
That was when I promised to give up the gambling. I swore to her that I would never make another bet for as long as I lived. I told her that if I ever did it again, she had my total consent to go live with her wealthy parents.
She told me she didn't want to leave me, but she wouldn't let our child grow up as poor as I did.
I understood. I didn't want that for the baby either.
Looking into Gloria's lovely eyes, giving up gambling seemed like such an easy thing to do. Anything seems easy when you're looking into the eyes of an angel. But, when her heavenly glow is far away, the real world settles on you and you realize things aren't as easy as they seem when Gloria asks you to do them.
It was a sure thing. A sure thing. Frank McCutcheon had never lost a match.
Never lost one match!
Can you believe how excited I was when the bet came up? When the fool bet against Frank the Tank? Yea, I know, I had promised Gloria, but this was a sure thing. I know it was a lot of money, but she'd forget all about my promise when I had the money to buy our baby all the things that we'd had our eyes on.
I could taste the money as I placed the bet. I knew this was the break that I had been so deserving of all this time. This was what I deserved. I deserved this…
I couldn't afford tickets to the fight…I watched the TV in our small apartment.
Numerous times, Gloria came in and interrupted me. I couldn't very well tell her why this fight was so important to me. I could only tell her to leave me alone.
She sat in the kitchenette, watching me from the small table, her small hands folded over her pregnant stomach.
I kicked the television screen open when Frank McCutcheon was knocked out. Gloria jumped to her feet just as the phone rang.
She rushed to answer it. I saw her eyes widen. I knew it was the fool already asking for his money.
Gloria slammed the phone back onto the cradle.
"You promised me!" She screeched before running into the bedroom.
I stayed in the living room, trying to convince myself that it hadn't really happened. As I stood there, drowning in denial, Gloria came from the bedroom, clutching a suitcase. She bid me a brisk goodbye and left the small apartment.
That's when my watch beeped.
Time to head to work.
Guess who my first client was…
I went into work angrier than I can ever remember being. I looked at the Post-It note on the desk in my miniscule office.
My first appointment scheduled was Frank McCutcheon. The secretary had written a small note about her excitement over the celebrity's presence, followed by a smiley face.
A wicked smile crossed my face as I crumbled the note with my gloved hand. I tossed it into the bin and walked slowly out of the office and into the less than up-to-code operating room.
He came in, looking even worse than he had looked on the television after the fight. I could clearly tell that his nose had been broken, along with multiple fractures in his jaw. His eyes were so swollen, I would have been surprised if he could have seen anything out of them. His lips were cracked, split, and swollen as well.
He was a mess.
"Can you fix me up, Doc?" He asked through the broken teeth in his mouth.
"I sure can, Mr. McCutcheon." I said with a foreboding grin. If he was able to see my grin, I'm sure he would've taken the opportunity to turn around and leave right then.
Instead, he lay himself down onto the small operating table and closed his eyes, entrusting me completely with his life after knowing me for only a few seconds.
It was at that moment that I realized what power I held in this job. I would take advantage of this power for the first time in my career.
I looked at the beaten man laying in front of me. He was an excellent fighter. There was no way that he actually lost against that newcomer.
I could see right through is game. I wondered if the amount of money he was offered to take the dive was more or less than the twenty-thousand dollars I lost betting in favor of this faker.
"Twenty-thousand dollars…" I muttered under my breath as I turned on the soundtrack to Gloria's beauty.
That's when it hit me. I had lost Gloria forever…I would never see the baby that she held inside of her. The music needed to be played while I sought my redemption. It was as if I was proving my worth to Gloria, despite the fact that she had already washed her hands of me.
I put the liar under anesthesia and began my work.
I began by making small incisions just over his eyelids to relieve the swelling. That's when I wanted to take my scalpel and ruin that face of his.
I wanted to tear everything on the inside and make it on the outside. I hated him for taking everything that I loved, everything that I had earned.
I slowly slid the scalpel underneath his eye, moving carefully behind the eyeball and popping it out, leaving an empty hole where those baby blues used to be.
I looked into those holes of nothingness and saw my vision cloud with tears.
Do not misunderstand, these weren't tears of remorse or sadness for what I had done to this man. They were tears of pure, unadulterated anger.
I made a small slit over the bridge of his nose and flipped the skin up as if I were going to perform a nose job, but I had ulterior motives in mind. My idea was to completely remove the cartilage in his nose, leaving nothing but the excess skin tissue.
So, I took my trusty scalpel and began to scoop away the soft cartilage inside his nasal cavity. I took a perverse thrill in sewing his nose back into its proper position. Without the cartilage to hold it up, it was flat and undeniably disfigured.
I moved to his mouth.
This was the mouth he lied through when he bragged about his sure win. I carefully twisted each tooth out of his disgusting mouth. Picking up my favorite scalpel once again, I sliced through his tongue, leaving nothing but a small stump of it inside of his mouth.
I looked at the wondrous creation that I had made of his face and another brilliant idea crossed my mind.
That's when I took the sutures and began to sew up those big black holes that were once his windows to the world.
Then I looked back at that cruel, toothless, tongueless mouth. I began to poke the needle through his upper lip. This skin seemed to be tougher than the softness around his eyes. I pushed through harder until the defiant lip gave way. I began to sew up that mouth as I switched off the anesthesia.
I pulled him into the alley, just as he was regaining consciousness so that he wouldn't be dead weight.
I had it all planned out. There was no way he would live through the night and I got the delicious taste of revenge for him taking my entire life away from me.
I went back upstairs, switched off the music, looked at the bloody mess and decided it was the maintenance man's problem.
I grabbed my coat and went back to that drab little apartment.
I loved every bit of the torture and given the chance, I would do it again and again.
And again and again…
And again and again…