It started on a Sunday, of course. The Lord’s day of rest. I was cooking a stew, a real beautiful, greasy sonofabitch. A huge roast beef from the Mexican market, four sticks of chorizo that I knew would just melt away into a river of glorious, heart-stopping fat, a couple cans of pintos, a head of cabbage, some tomatoes. It was delicious. A real symphony of future shits.
And in the middle of all this culinary genius, I rubbed my eye. The left one. Probably had a handful of raw chorizo grease on my knuckles. I kept at it, a good, satisfying rub. And then I knew. The itch. The burn. The quiet, little whisper of a future infection.
I didn’t blame my friend who was over. We hadn’t done anything that would explain it. No, this was a self-inflicted wound. By Tuesday, my eye was a goddamn work of art. Puffy, swollen, red. Looked like I’d gotten into a bar fight with a man wearing a big, ugly ring. All the tell-tale signs of a problem.
So I humbled myself. I went to Urgent Care. Another one of these new-fangled Blue Cross bullshit places where you don’t have a real doctor, just a series of “gatekeepers” to keep you from getting any real help. I walk in, my eye all beat to hell, and a woman comes in. A nurse practitioner. And I just knew. Something about women in positions of authority—airline pilots, project managers, and now, apparently, the one person standing between me and a bottle of goddamn antibiotics. I knew something bad was going to happen.
She looked at my eye, her face all scrunched up in a mask of professional concern. “Oh, yeah,” she said, her voice a weak, uncertain thing. “Yeah, well, shoot. Yeah. Well, let’s get you a droplet. It’s got steroids in it. That’ll shrink things up, and then, you know, give it time to cure it. Yeah, that’ll be good. Definitely something’s going on in there.”
She talked like a goddamn valley girl performing an autopsy. I got my paperwork, they charged my insurance seven hundred bucks for the five-minute consultation, and I went to wait in line at the pharmacy.
I finally get to the counter, and the pharmacist, a tired-looking bastard with honest eyes, he looks at the prescription. He looks at me. He looks back at the prescription.
“This isn’t a prescription,” he says.
“The hell it isn’t,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, “but it’s over-the-counter stuff.”
“What?”
“It’s basically Visine,” he says. “The kind you get for allergies, to get the red out.”
I took off my sunglasses. “Look at my eye, you dumb bastard,” I said. “You think a little Visine is going to fix this?”
He just looked at my eye, a real work of modern art, and he had the decency to wince. “No,” he said. “It’ll take away some of the irritation. But it ain’t gonna solve the problem.”
I went back to my truck, my hands shaking a little. I called the clinic. “Look,” I said, “the shit you gave me is over-the-counter. My eye is all jacked up. I came to you for a solution, not a goddamn relief pitcher. I could have gone to 7-Eleven and gotten this shit myself.”
But they just doubled down. “Oh, well,” the receptionist chirped, “the pharmacist probably felt bad for you because your Blue Cross didn’t cover the real prescription.”
“Bitch,” I said, “it’s nine goddamn dollars. What do you mean they didn’t cover it? The guy never even looked at my insurance.”
“Well,” she continued, her voice all sticky with lies, “the stuff we prescribed, the stuff with the steroids in it, that will help you.”
I raced back to the pharmacy. The guy sees me coming. “Yeah,” he says, “they’ve been calling me. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” He points to the ingredients on the box of the over-the-counter crap. Then he shows me the ingredients on the “prescription.” The same goddamn thing.
“What about the steroids?” I ask.
“No steroids,” he says.
“Is this shit going to help my eye?”
“No,” he says, with the beautiful, weary honesty of a man who has to deal with idiots all day. “It’ll relieve it. But it ain’t gonna solve the problem.”
So, just before seven o’clock, I raced back to the Urgent Care. I walk in, tell the receptionist to get the nurse practitioner. She comes out, her eyes all timid and scared. I show her my eye. “It’s getting worse,” I tell her. “Is this the best you can do? Where are the antibiotics? Where’s the goddamn solution? You people are the gatekeepers for the shit I need, and you’re handing me a box of fucking Visine.”
And she doubled down again. “Well,” she said, her voice a little squeak, “I think this is the best path. You use this for a week, and if it doesn’t get any better, or it starts oozing, or your eye pops out, then I’ll set up an appointment with an eye doctor.”
“An eye doctor?” I said. “For a goddamn pink eye? I’m seeing you. There are only two things this can be. Figure it out.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t feel comfortable giving you antibiotics.”
Like they were goddamn opium pills. Like I was some junkie, jonesing for a fucking amoxicillin fix.
And then she contradicted herself. “Maybe the pink eye will solve itself,” she said. I could have done that myself. Why the hell did I spend seven hundred bucks for this visit? And she wasn’t even saying she’d fix it if it got worse. She was just going to pass me off to someone else. What a scam. What a fucking scam.
And I knew what the problem was. She was alone in there, a woman with a little bit of power and no goddamn idea what to do with it. She needed a man in a white coat to stand behind her, some emasculated blow-up doll of a doctor she could turn to and say, “Do you concur, doctor? Am I doing the right thing?” And he’d nod his empty head and say, “Yes, nurse, you’re doing the right thing.”
So now I wake up, and there’s a little trickle of pus coming out of my eye. I have a date tomorrow with a beautiful black woman. Absolutely gorgeous. Young, sharp, energized. We’re supposed to go to the Union, drink a few glasses of wine, listen to some live music.
And there I’ll be, trying to be charming, trying to be a man, with a little river of yellow shit dripping down my face.
“Hey,” I’ll say, “wanna go home with me tonight?”
Drip… drip… drip…
