You have to understand, I was living in a goddamn chicken coop on the North Shore. A beautiful, respectable, and completely absurd little box. And I was working a job to match: a water treatment plant on the West Side. A glorious, million-dollar palace built to process human shit.
It was a Friday. The end of the day. The project was done. Everybody had gone home to their quiet, respectable, and completely boring lives. I just had one last thing to do. Drain a million gallons of treated, but still pretty goddamn nasty, water out of a digester. The sump pump wasn’t in the right spot.
So I did the manly thing. I shimmied on my belly into the manway, a 3-foot hole over a 30-foot drop, and I used the rigid pipe to push the pump over to the deep end. Easy. I push myself back out, and scratch. A little, tiny, “meow” of a scratch on my ankle, from the containment lid. Didn’t even bleed. Just a white mark. I didn’t think a goddamn thing about it.
It’s Friday night in Hawaii. What do you do? You go meet your old intern, a smart Korean kid from Philly, and you watch the sunset. And then you proceed to get shit-faced. Ten beers. A goddamn mountain of fried, greasy, beautiful food. I’m already on the pre-diabetes watchlist, and here I am, pouring rocket fuel into an engine that’s already sputtering, on top of whatever beautiful, exotic bacteria just crawled into my bloodstream from the shit-tank. I somehow managed to make the long drive home, a beautiful, drunken, and completely irresponsible miracle.
Saturday, I’m a wreck. Hungover, sure, but this is… different. A quiet, ugly, and completely unfamiliar kind of exhaustion. I drag my ass to my secret beach, watch the sunset, and go to bed early.
Sunday, the real rot sets in. The cold. Not island-breeze cold. No. This was a deep, dark, and completely honest-to-God arctic cold, coming from the inside of my own bones. I’m in the fetal position, in a goddamn chicken coop in 80-degree weather, shivering, shaking, chugging cough medicine, and telling myself, “I got this. It’s just a cold. I’ll break it.”
And then the phone rings. It’s her. My… her. The beautiful, little Filipino girl from Honolulu. The one I’d been “dating” for three goddamn years but refused to give a title to, because I’m a beautiful, independent, and completely selfish bastard. I don’t even remember talking to her.
But she, this woman I never treated well, this “non-girlfriend,” she hears the goddamn death in my voice. And she drives. An hour. Across the entire island, in the middle of the night, to my shitty little chicken coop.
She finds me. A pathetic, incoherent, shaking pile of meat. “I’m fine,” I probably slurred. “I got this.”
She takes one look at me and says, “The hell you do.”
She drags my ass to her car. She drives me all the way back to Honolulu, to the big, clean, respectable palace of Kaiser Permanente. They stick me in a goddamn wheelchair. Usually, I’d be embarrassed. I’d be ashamed. But I was so far gone, so beautiful, ugly, and completely out of it, I just… didn’t care. The humor was gone. I was just cargo.
They get me inside. The measurements come back. Fever: 105. Heart rate: a goddamn hummingbird, trying to hammer its way out of my chest. They stick IVs in me, take X-rays, MRIs, the whole beautiful, expensive, and completely useless nine yards. I’m just… fading. I’ve given up.
The doctor, a clean, respectable sonofabitch, he comes in, pats my arm. “Look,” he says, “I’ve looked at your charts. Your liver is beat up, your lifestyle is a goddamn reckless shitshow, but there’s nothing on the scans. It’s gotta be food poisoning from that fried food Friday.”
He’s about to leave, to fill me with antibiotics for a shrimp I didn’t eat. And he does this little pat-down. Touches my chest, my neck, my thigh… and then he gets to my ankle.
He stops.
He looks down at the scratch. That tiny, little, forgotten cat scratch, which is now a beautiful, red, and completely angry-looking welt. And he feels it. “Your ankle,” he says, his voice changing, “it’s radiating… heat.”
He looks at me. “Tell me about this.”
“Friday,” I mumbled. “Water treatment plant. Just a scratch. From the lid.”
And in that one, quiet, beautiful, and completely terrifying moment, the whole goddamn room changes. The “food poisoning” bullshit evaporates. The doctor’s eyes go wide. He knows. I know. The shit got in. The bacteria from a million gallons of human waste found a tiny, open door into my blood, and it was eating me alive.
That’s the last thing I remember.
I woke up three days later on the 4th floor, in a pool of my own sweat. The fever had broken. A beautiful Filipino doctor, a couple of Filipino nurses, smiling at me. “You’re lucky,” they said. They told me my white blood cell count was so high they thought I was a goner. A near-death experience, one for the books.
I spent two more days in that hospital, denying sponge baths I probably should have taken. And I had a lot of time to think. About the scratch. About the booze. About how you can be a tough, 57-year-old bastard, a king in your own mind, and you can be taken out by a microscopic, ugly, and completely invisible little bug.
But mostly? I thought about that Filipino girl. The one I never treated right. The one I wouldn’t even give a goddamn title to. The one who drove across an island in the dark to save the life of a man who was, in all honesty, a complete and utter asshole to her.
And that, right there, that’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely devastating moral of the story, isn’t it? You can be the biggest, toughest, and most independent sonofabitch in the world, a real “lone wolf,” but in the end, your life might just be saved by the one, quiet, beautiful, and completely honest connection you were too stupid, too proud, and too goddamn manly to ever acknowledge.
