"GUESSWORK"
- Chapter Two -
"Taking A Personal Inventory"
The apartment was dark, blinds pulled down, drapes drawn together. He recognized the musty odor of long abandonment, mixed with a faint, lingering twinge of Lysol.
Not his doing!
Wilson had been here. Cleaning up after him. Weeks before, probably.
He dropped the backpack inside the front door and flicked on the light, stood still for a moment, looking around.
He remembered back, six weeks earlier … the morning he'd gone to work feeling miserable about leaving his place in such a fucking mess.
That morning, he'd finally leveled with the kids. He was checking himself into rehab. Tritter and Cuddy and Wilson had won the war by sheer weight of numbers, and even his staff had knuckled under after being issued strict orders by their superiors and that quiet-voiced, gray-haired "champion of justice".
He'd felt conspired against and backed into a corner and even a little irrational, full of resentment and denial. It had never been possible for him to explain to any of them that it was the pain in his leg that drove him to such extremes.
It was still impossible, even in this "enlightened" day and age, to convince anyone that he was dependent on pain meds to get him through the difficulties of everyday living … and not from any addictive desire to get high and stay that way! He took the Vicodin because he hurt! Because the pain was often excruciating.
He should have saved his breath!
People could not relate to what he was experiencing. They would have to suffer such pain themselves in order to understand what it put him through every day of his life. No explanation he had ever attempted left anyone without some amount of skepticism, some lingering seed of doubt. Their eyes remained clouded with suspicion, and they stared at him every time, half expecting to find deceit, while his own eyes glittered hotly with his barely contained agony.
And then he had allowed himself to fall into addictive behavior.
He sighed, leaning wearily against the wall inside the door, and let it swing closed behind him. Fuck them all!
His skin reeked of rehab cooking, rehab furniture and rehab atmosphere. His clothing gave off a faint odor of too many neglected bodies in close proximity to his own. The stench of too much stale sweat and an amalgam of narcotics and detox, mingled with the powerful pheromones of too much unresolved anger. All this angst vied for dominance over too much sullen silence, and way too much despair, all exuding stenches of their own.
Every time someone left rehab … declared "clean" … another human garbage pile took his or her place. And so it went. A constant rotation of abused merchandise!
00000000
Hah!House, for chrissakes, get your head out of your ass and pay attention to what you're doing!
I reached to the inside pocket of my jacket and drew out the skinny pack of cigarettes, a little squooshed, a little bent.
Marlboro Man!
I lit one and took a long, deep drag. It took the edge off the pain in my thigh for a few seconds, and I closed my eyes and rolled with it. I have good-sized vials of Neurontin and Ultram, and a small bottle of Advil in my backpack … shitty substitutes for real pain relievers! Sometimes I think I might as well swallow a handful of M&Ms.
But I won't go back to the Vicodin, even if it kills me!
I thought for a minute about letting myself melt onto the couch and just lay there, smelly clothes and all, and try to catch some sleep until Wilson gets here in a tizzy this evening, wondering where the fuck I am …
But no! The last thing I need is more overtures from Wilson … sitting across from my weary ass with those sad eyes … begging me for some sign that our long friendship … if that's what you wanna call it … survived the Tritter garbage still in one piece.
Is it fixable? Who the hell knows? Or cares …I made all the amends to Wilson that I ever intend to make. I still have the gift bag with the red necktie … gift tag ripped to hell, but still in there … that he reached across the space between us to hand me. "Charm the judge…" he said with a goofy smile. Yeah. Something like that.
He sat there with his hands hanging loose between his knees, just staring at me. The words of Step Eight flashed through my mind right then: "Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all …"
Crap! If I did that, I'd be here for the next ten years!
"You did what you did to help me. I understand that."
Enough said!
The damn necktie is still in my backpack. What does that tell me?
I finished the cigarette and looked down between my feet where the ashes lay in little piles of gray on the clean floor. Screw it! I have no ashtrays anymore. After the damn infarction, I quit smoking. Well, so much for good intentions! I pushed away from the wall and walked into the kitchen. The fucked-up muscles in my leg felt like somebody was clubbing me with a baseball bat every step I took. I got clean and sober for this? I dumped the butt into the sink and ran water over it. Left the remains lay in the trap.
It was time to get the show on the road. No more procrastinating.
I left the kitchen and limped my sorry ass into the bathroom. God, it hurt! Stripped to the skin, dumped the stinking clothes in the empty hamper.
Christ! Wilson even did my laundry!
I paused and looked at myself clinically in the mirror.
The ol' bod was gaunt. Pale.
"Prison Pallor!"
My skin looks kind'a like cardboard … that thin gray stuff that lines the bottoms of shipping boxes. It makes me shiver, and I look further down at my body. My ribcage reminds me of a xylophone, my hips like the skeletal ribs of an old ship. Even my goddamn pecker is starving to death … can't even remember the last time it got into anything … interesting.
And the leg … the underlying cause of all my recent troubles: it's a mess from hip to toes. The surgical scar goes all the way to the femur, and looks like the meteor crater in the Arizona desert. The pain gouges at it like lightning strikes around the lip of the crater. Circulation is impaired below the knee and causes no end of problems …
Christ! My teeth are chattering like a dog shitting bones!The sight of my leg sickens me. It tells me how fragile my body has become. I'd always hated looking at it, and usually avoided it, even in the shower. Some sadistic gremlin inside my head keeps telling me that if I don't look, that huge wound isn't there.
I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the overpowering need for a Vicodin.
"Admitted we were powerless over drugs … that our lives had become unmanageable."
I finally sucked it up and got into the shower, hot as I could stand it without cooking … and stood there like a zombie for at least ten minutes. Soaking. Standing on the one foot that would hold me. Hurting. Biting my lip.
A big gob of shampoo in the palm of my hand cleansed me from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, and let me lose the rehab stench. Anything remaining'll just have to wear off! I let the water rinse me down again until it ran clear at the bottom of the tub. I did that twice!
I got out of there the same way I got in. Sat on the edge of the tub and lifted the right leg over the side, then followed through with the left. I dried myself down and then reached for the cane.
In the bedroom, I dressed sparingly. I would need boots for the length of time I'd be spending on the bike. Quality running shoes when not.
I pulled on jeans, socks and a tee shirt, then found the boots I bought shortly after I got the Honda crotch rocket for five-grand of Wilson's money. They have composition soles, but soft uppers, and they've got zippers up the insides of the ankles. Excellent! They're lightweight. Absolutely essential to counteract the punishment I'll be giving the damn leg.
I dug out other casual clothing, my old man's U. S. Marines canteen, an old Swiss Army knife, and the sleeping bag I had since I was a kid. Other odds and ends, as I thought of them, completed my "ensemble." It took two trips for me to lug it all into the living room.
An hour later, I had everything I needed packed and ready to go. An old tin candy box in my underwear drawer yielded $1600.00 in twenties. I stashed $400 under two strips of duct tape at the ankle of the right boot and another $400 in the left. Insurance against a possible mugging. The other half I jammed into a front jeans pocket. Maybe I'd look for a safer place to stash it … later.
My wallet, with five one-hundred-dollar bills, went into the left hip pocket of my jeans. I still needed to stop at the nearest ATM and pull out more cash. I wouldn't be using any credit cards once I left the state. Nobody needed to know shit about which direction I'd taken … or even a hint that I'd taken any direction at all!
For all anybody knows, I could be sound asleep under my fucking bed!
By 2:00 p.m. the bike was packed; both saddlebags stashed with clothing and goodies I'd never miss if it got lost. I lashed the sleeping bag to the back of the saddle. The next-to-useless substitute pills were still in the backpack … along with a stash of snacks, a few first aid supplies, what was left of the roll of duct tape, a tiny bar-b-que grille and a raft of "just-in-case" items I stuck in there and probably wouldn't give another thought to …
My cell phone would pose a dead giveaway to my position, so I stashed it in the old tin candy box where the twenties had been, and hid it back in my underwear drawer. Where I was headed, I wasn't about to contact anybody, or have anybody try to contact me.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a win-win situation!
The apartment looks pretty much the same as it did when I got here, except for the dirty clothes in the hamper, the cigarette ashes on the floor, and the doused butt in the sink.
Wilson will find 'em all tonight when he stops by to check. He'll scratch his head and wonder where the hell I was when he stopped at rehab to pick me up … and why I'm not waiting for him here.
Screw him! Let him wonder!
I clicked the cane into its place on the side of the bike.
Downtown, I hit the ATM for another wad of cash, and the Honda and I left Princeton at 3:30 p.m., headed south.
It was March … cold and windy … and in North Carolina there would be nothing but warm breezes and sunshine!
"On the road again … I can't wait to get on the road again …"0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
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