My contacts feel as if they’ve been transformed into miniature potato chips, fused to my corneas. My whole body buzzes from massive quantities of nicotine. My kidneys are pulsating, trying to escape through my back. My mouth is gummy from dehydration, and I am desperately thirsty. This is the all-too-familiar physical sensation I feel upon waking from a night of drinking. I know from experience that this is just the starting point. The real pain comes when my brain begins functioning. I want to go back to sleep before this happens.
Too late.
“Take it easy.”
My eyes focus. There is a young uniformed police officer standing over me.
“Take it easy,” he repeats. “There is nothing you can do right now.”
Fuck. This is not my room and not my bed. It’s a hospital bed. There is a cop standing over me, and I have
an IV in my arm. Very Fuck.
The young cop says something, but I can’t hear what he says through the blaring in my head. He has kind
eyes. He leaves for just a moment and returns with a tall thin lady doctor, like one from a medical soap opera. She has a shiny instrument with a trigger. I’m sorry she has had to wake up to deal with me. She’s probably married and has kids and lives in Beverly Hills. I picture her in bed with her husband when her pager sounds. He stirs and she kisses him, and she gets up and checks the number. It’s a medical emergency, sure enough. She tells him, “Go back to sleep, Honey; I’ll be back soon.”
She applies alcohol to my head with an oversized Q-tip. She has the fingers of a pianist. She holds the gun to my head.
“This is going to hurt, so brace yourself.”
I grip the bed railings tightly and clench my jaw.
Chikew! The brassy sound echoes off the hard-lit sterile white walls. She stands back and observes me.
She looks bewildered at my lack of reaction.
“That didn’t hurt?” the doctor asks, rhetorically.
It didn’t. She does it again and again. Each time the loud, brassy sound ricochets off the walls offending
what should be the quietest time of the night. She is stapling my scalp back together, but the procedure is no more painful than a haircut. I open my eyes. She looks at me again. She’s puzzled at my lack of pain, and she is disgusted by me. She is disgusted by me, because I’m disgusting. You’re right, Lady Doctor, and I’m sorry.
It turns out I’m not in a hospital, just a medical room in the police station. The doctor finishes, and the cop takes me to use the phone. After my drunk driving accident, I never thought I’d have another “one phone call”, but here I am, in the Santa Monica Police Station, in the same building where I’d had my first law school moot court competition ten years earlier. I’ve handled several cases in this building; I even know a couple of the judges.
I call Keri, my ex-girlfriend/criminal defense attorney, and after a disheartening number of rings, she finally picks up.
“Keri, Oh, you picked up,” I say, relieved. “Thank God. Uh … I’m in trouble, and I need you to come bail me out.”
“Joseph … serious? Are you drunk?”
“Yes, I’m drunk and no, I mean yes, I’m serious.”
“Where are you?”
“Santa Monica jail.”
Keri sighs deeply into the receiver. It’s the sound of exasperated disappointment that I became so familiar
with during our tumultuous relationship and during her handling of my felony DUI case.
“What are you being charged with?”
“I uh … I … well, don’t know exactly … probably … uh … solicitation?”
“Solicitation of what?”
“Uh …” I realize there is no good way to say it, so I just say it, “prostitution.”
“Prostitution”—She sighs again, louder this time. “Joseph, really?”
“Well, I don’t know, really. It could be anything. I was really wasted. Actually, I still am. I don’t remember
much. You’ll find out when you get here. Just hurry up, and bail me out, okay?”
I’m taken to a holding cell. I’m by myself. There is a big steel door, and I stare at it wondering who will
come through it. It’s been at least two hours, and still no Keri. I shiver as cold alcohol and nicotine-laced sweat leaches out of my pores. A merciful lady cop brings me an itchy, gray, wool blanket and gives me a tight smile, as if she’s looking at a rabid dog that used to be a cute family pet but now must be put down. The blanket doesn’t stop me from shivering.
I recall some mental snapshots of the night but nothing new. I’m starting to feel crawly. This is what happens after I binge drink. I need another drink so I can come down easy. I wish Keri would come get me out of here. I need a cold beer right away. I just want to shut my eyes and wake up in my bed. I shut my eyes, but I start to see a kaleidoscope of ants in red, and blue flashes of light. God, I just want to be in my bed. I wish I’d not gone out drinking. Just this once, I wish I’d done the right thing.
Keri finally arrives. The lady cop takes me to a visiting booth. Plexiglas separates Keri and me. She looks scared. Her full lips are white, and her eucalyptus-colored eyes washed grey. She holds her mouth tight.
“Goddamn, Keri, what took you so long?” I ask through the telephone receiver.
“I was meeting with the detectives. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to see you. They didn’t want to let me see you.”
“What? Why? I figured you were dealing with bail.”
Keri is acting odd, even for this situation. She should be mad at me for waking her up, not to mention for getting arrested again after she finally settled my drunk driving case. There is something else, something grave; she looks like she used to look when we lived together in law school, and I’d hold her in the middle of the night after she’d woken up from a nightmare.
“What’s the deal Keri? When do I get out of here?”
She stares right at me, then down, then into my eyes again. I know that move. She’s about to cry, but this time she doesn’t. Instead, she shuts her eyes for a long moment. When she opens her eyes, she has her lawyer mask on.
“You don’t understand,” Keri says. “Don’t say anything to anyone.” She speaks with a slow solemnity that makes me realize that she must be right. Suddenly, things have become terribly serious.
“Keri, what am I being charged with?”
She takes a deep breath in through her teeth and then blows it out hard. “You are being charged with Attempted Murder.”
This is an excerpt from Straight Pepper Diet (Killer-McMillan Publishing, 2015). All rights reserved.
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