The fact of the matter is I always wasn’t like this. I used to talk all the time. Then something happened. No, I didn’t have one of those after school special moments where I take some acid at a party in my keg cup, jump off a roof into a pool, and run into the woods to find the great golden albatross, but it was close. I think it was a Friday, but let's make it a Saturday — things seem to start better on weekends.
My house that my parents lived in used to be in the suburbs near the middle school that I went to. I imagined that I was Indiana Jones walking to school, hiding in the bushes until I heard the first bell drone over the pall of my imagination and sprinted to band practice. They live in Florida now at a place where they can see the shuttle take off. They moved there just in time to see Discovery explode. I kinda wished I could have been there for it, with ’em, so I could see the expression on their faces, the kind of blank white poker face that starts in the listless eyes and ends with the open-mouthed, gaping, incredulous expression of dumbfounded wonder and terror. But I wasn’t; at that time I was being psychoanalyzed.
But that house “ it had, until the neighbors complained to the neighborhood commission, citing section five clause B of our homeowner contract, this huge fountain with two angels, cherubs specifically, pissing into the mouths of alligators. Some gaudy Italian marble job that we had to pay about five thousand dollars for sight unseen to have shipped and installed on this little mound in front of our house that’s covered in ivy. No one in the family really even liked the fountain, but we couldn’t just send it back to Italy, so we kept it and it became this sort of perverse object of adoration and pride amongst us. Any friends or neighbors that said something bad about it would instantly feel the wrath of the clan upon them. One time my Aunt Bernice came to visit from Bend, and when the taxi pulled up she said to my mother,
“Shirl, why’s those cute little boys pissing into those there alligator’s mouths?”
My mom just wrung her hands together and stretched her back, telling her sister,
“If you don’t like it Bernie, you can go back to your little doublewide up there in Bend, and piss yourself.”
My mom didn’t really like her sisters. In fact, the only people that she had as legitimate friends were the people that she wrote to in prison. That was how it started, with those letters.
This one night I was playing Super Nintendo with my brother, playing Mario Battle, and I was kicking his ass. Swept him for five straight games until he stormed out of the room and knocked over my bowl of Cheerios from slamming the door too hard. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he broke that door, ’cause my dad came up the stairs yelling at him to NEVER SLAM THAT DOOR AGAIN AND APOLOGIZE TO YOUR BROTHER, with my brother yelling back to LEAVE ME ALONE, and NO I DON’T WANT TO CLEAN UP THE ROOSTER CAGES! Oh yeah, we kept roosters in the back of our house and charged stud fees to breeders at chicken ranches to impregnate their hens. Made some pretty good money too, in that rooster business, but the bastards always woke you up ’round five in the morning every day with their cuck’ol’do’de’doing until you went out there and banged the cages some.
Since I couldn’t play Mario Battle alone, and since by that time it was getting pretty late in the night and I was feeling pretty sleepy, I figured it was beddie-bye time. I got a glass of milk from the kitchen downstairs, and just as I was putting my favorite cup away that I got from the UFC fight I went to the month before, I heard this crash come from upstairs. Thinking my brother was going agro on my keychain collection, I ran up to my room, but heard another huge thump in my parent’s room as I was rounding the corner from the landing into the hall, and this faint little noise that sounded like the noise a puppy makes when you forget to feed it. Mom always tells me that I should never go into her room without knocking on the door, so I give it my special knock and I hear this voice I don’t recognize yell SHUT UP BITCH really really loudly and then my mom screaming. My brother heard this too and came into the hall with his Little League baseball bat and helmet on, ready to rumble. He creeps up to the door in his best Ninja impression and turns the handle. The door opens and nothing happens. No sound, no light, nothing. We look at each other, my brother and me, and he shrugs, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to have some strange crashing and shouting coming from my parent’s room.
That’s the last thing I remember, besides feeling a dull thud right on the spot where your back meets your neck and your spine has that little bony knob you can feel with your fingers when you rub it, ringing in my ears and fireflies spinning around in the room until I hit the floor. I woke up after that in the hospital and it was Monday.
Most people have this perverse aversion to hospitals, like they’re some sort of modern day equivalent to the mythical spirit land of Vikings or something; good to think about, but very bad to visit if you're not a Viking, or a doctor. I love hospitals. All those people in white walking around importantly with clipboards in that kind of walk that looks like a walk, but you know if there weren’t rules like they have at my local pool where you have to walk around the edge of the pool so you don’t slip and fall and break your neck, these white-coated specters would break out and sprint down the hallways as fast as they could. But the real reason that I like hospitals so much is that everyone gives you so much attention when you are lying there with all those tubes and machines hooked in you. People ignore the TV even, just to sit there and hold your hand or talk about baseball with that solemn air on their faces like they’re negotiating for peace with Hitler in a railcar.
Everyone was there when I woke up: mom, dad, my brother, my aunt Bernice all the way from Bend with her husband and their two eight year old twin sisters, and this guy named Clyde who I didn’t know at all. Everyone, except Clyde, was hugging and crying and thanking Jesus, God, the academy, the doctors “ practically everyone “ that I was awake. It’s funny, I didn’t even feel like I slept at all; felt just like I turned off, then back on again, like a light bulb. But light bulbs can’t feel, so that’s a ridiculous comparison.
Clyde was writing something in this little yellow notebook of his. Later, I found out that Clyde was some kind of doctor that specialized in childhood blunt force spine trauma, which I experienced that Friday, or Saturday, night. Turns out, my mom actually knew the guy that robbed us of our jewelry and me of my sense of smell; just out of Soledad; his name was Mark. Marcos, as he liked to be called, started writing my mom about three months before his release. He had this little anger problem, Marcos, and was in this gang called the Surenos. Seems he landed some jail time for throwing a mailbox through a McDonald’s plate glass window when he was on Angeldust because the guy behind the counter wouldn’t let him have any extra sauce packets with his six piece chicken McNuggets. The bastards. Don’t they know to never deny someone anything when they are on PCP? For chrissakes, they could tear your arms out of your sockets and beat ya to death with ’em, and then run a marathon, what’s a little packet of sauce cost compared to fixing that window? Probably a lot.
So Marcos starts writing my mom and somehow gets her address from an envelope that one of the guards forgot to black out the return address on, and visits us when he gets out and steals whatever he can carry after beating my dad unconscious and tying up my mom and brother. I just laid there in a heap on the landing right before my parents door limp as a rag doll while he was deciding just which of my baseball cards were the most valuable. He took most of my Padres and Dodgers cards, but obviously didn’t know what he was doing, because he left me with my ’88 McGuire Olympic card. The cad.
His letters that he wrote, though, were something. He kept sending these little snapshots of him lifting weights, in a towel, with other inmates cheering him on. For the longest time afterward I thought that prison was a really friendly place, ’cause all I saw in those pictures were smiling faces and genuine enthusiasm, but of course that’s not true. Prison is an ugly blemish on the stain of modern society. I wholeheartedly believe that. If it wasn’t for prison, I would still have my sense of smell, and wouldn’t be working in a sewer killing rats and bats and alligators. Well, not really alligators, but bats “ lots of bats.
There’s a common misconception that alligators live in sewers. This is not true. It is too cold for alligators to live in sewers, they’re cold blooded and need sunlight to survive. There is no sunlight in sewers, therefore, alligators cannot live in them. Neither can snakes, except in warm tropical climates, like Hawaii. Snakes have been known to swim up from the sewer and float around in toilet bowls, chillin’ there unsuspected until…well, I’ll let you imagine the rest.
Clyde told me that my spine was pinched by the blow to my neck just enough to impair my ability to smell. He told me I was lucky, most trauma to the same region makes people unable to walk or form sounds with their lips so they could not converse with people except with the help of a talking computer, like the one that Stephen hawking uses in his lectures. I didn’t feel too lucky, my neck still hurt and the only sensation that I had in my nose was a numb itchy feeling that you get sometimes when you stay out in the snow too long and your nose goes numb. So I asked him,
“Clyde, why is there a tingling feeling in my nose?”
Clyde looked down at his notebook, shifted his feet, looked me squarely in the eye and said,
“Because the nerves that normally would be used by your body for smelling stuff have reverted to being just regular nerve endings again.”
“So I will never smell again, right?”
“Right, but if someone punches you in the nose, it is going to really, really hurt.”
That I found out to be true as well, I was in a bar the other night drinking Guinness and watching soccer, Liverpool versus Manchester in Premiere League play, and I said something to the effect that the only good thing to come out of Manchester was some bad acid and worse trance, and got squarely punched in the face by a drunk English longshoreman muttering for me to
“Dally your little bloody wanking opinions to your bloody self, wanker.”
There was blood all over my new white shirt and my nose really, really hurt. Clyde never did lie to me, come to think of it.
They eventually found Marcos and we got him sent back to jail, but since he was in that gang called the Surenos, and since he was a pretty likable fella, once you got to know him off Angeldust, there was a contract out on our lives. My brother, one night coming back from a high school football game, was almost killed when he found out that his brakes were cut, but thanks to some quick thinking he didn’t die because he pulled the emergency brake and ground down the concrete median to finally come to a stop in the middle of the freeway. After that my parents changed their names and moved to Florida. My brother is going to college in another state with a different name too.
As for me, I had other things comin’. I could either go to college like my brother, join the freak show circuit and snort chili peppers for the rest of my life and die of heartburn, or get a job with the city killing vermin and unclogging sewer pipes at forty dollars an hour. To go to college I would have to first graduate high school, and to do that I would need to move to Florida with my parents, and I really didn’t want to move to Florida, because of the alligators. Heartburn didn’t sound like a good way to go out, and I never liked traveling that much, so it seemed that the sewer was the way for me. Clyde set it all up with a phone call; I met with my supervisor, Larry, at his office downtown and started the next day. Every once and a while, working down in the sewer, I will get the faint tingle in my nose and think that my smell is coming back, but most of the time it’s just a fly or little speck of shit that’s on the tip of my nose that you normally wouldn’t feel, but I have super nose nerve endings, so I do.
Monthly I meet with Clyde to talk about not having the ability to smell. Mostly I tell him about how hard it is to tell if you need to shower, and how hard it is to talk to girls if you forget to bathe and then go out on Friday night. He listens, scribbles notes, and keeps a fan in the window running full blast constantly throughout our conference. He’s really the only person that I talk to face to face anymore. Working in a sewer doesn’t really give you a permanent stink, but I would rather not have to worry about something that doesn’t exist to me, like smell. So mostly on Friday’s I watch the Netflicks that I got that week in the mail or try out those internet dating services that you always see on TV with that white haired doctor smiling and telling you that you are one click away from finding the love of your life. I really like the internet. It can’t smell, just like me.