The Nirvana Blues (57 page)

“I'm tired of your doomsday bullshit.” Heidi took a noisy, challenging drag from her beer. “If he wants to wrestle, let him wrestle. If you don't want to, at least be honest and say so, don't blame it on Michael's nose.”

“If I smash his nose again and we have to rush him to the emergency room, that's thirty dollars just to walk through the door,” Joe said angrily. “I don't understand where any of you people are coming from, I really don't. How can you be so cavalier about a broken nose?”

“I could wear my football helmet,” Michael suggested hopefully.

“Oh great. You wear your football helmet, then
I
get at least a broken nose, or, just possibly, a concussion.”

“It won't hurt his nose to wrestle,” Heather pleaded. “Come on, Daddy,
please?
”

“No. It's crazy. Haven't we got enough free bad luck without going out and deliberately recruiting some more?”

“Well, that's too bad.” Heidi released a pregnant sigh. “I know Michael and Heather were looking forward to it. They so rarely have a chance to interact with you these days.”

“If you had a broken nose would you wrestle?” Joe asked incredulously.

“Yes, under the circumstances, I think I would.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“Well, these. I mean, you promised, Joey. And I don't think this is the best time in the lives of our children to begin breaking promises.”

“And you really think I won't hurt his nose?”

“Not if you're routinely careful, no.”

“Can you guarantee something horrible won't happen?”

“Sure, I guarantee it. All you have to do is exercise a modicum of constraint. Of course, I realize that for you these days that presents quite a challenge—”

“All right, I'll wrestle. Just so long as we make one thing perfectly clear. If that nose gets clobbered, I ain't taking the rap.”

Both kids shouted “Yaaayyy!” Heather assured him, “Don't worry, Daddy, we'll be extra special careful.” They raced from the room.

Joe called, “Where are you going?”

“Uniforms!”

Heidi smiled. “There. See how easy it is to make children deliriously happy?”

“But if his nose gets clobbered again…”

“It won't. Believe me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I
said
it won't. I promise. I guarantee it.”

“Just so that everybody understands it's not my fault if—”

“No ifs, Joey. It's simply not going to happen.”

Who had she been talking to, Nikita Smatterling again? Joe cleared furniture to the side. Then, with much grunting and cursing, he retrieved the double mattress from the master bedroom, and dumped it in the middle of the living room. Removing his shoes, he assumed a lotus position on the mattress, folded his arms, and adopted an evil, leering expression. The kids returned. Michael wore a baseball cap, a Luke Skywalker T-shirt, Jockey underwear, and purple knee socks. Heather sported a Japanese bandanna, a red body-suit, and white bobby-sox.

Joe raised his hands, the fingers bent like monster claws, gnashing his teeth. Gleefully, the kids pranced around the mattress, swerving close then leaping away as his deadly talons swiped at them. Briefly, they huddled, planning an attack. Joe gestured menacingly and snarled out his usual bag of derisions: “Come on, you lily-livered lilliputians, I dare you to attack. Come here, you chickenshit little scaredy-cats, I wanna crush your heads like eggshells.”

The preliminaries endured about five minutes. Michael and Heather positioned themselves on either side of him, Michael shouted “One, two,
three!
” and, simultaneously, they charged. Joe embraced their jet-propelled bodies with an “oof!” and the wrestle began.

Their momentum knocked him over sideways. Their goal was to pin down his arms, and knuckle-drill his sternum. They rarely succeeded, but had fun trying. At the penultimate moment, Joe always worked himself free in a frenzy of grunting, gasping, and blasphemy. The kids continuously shouted orders to each other: “Get his arm, Heather.
Get his arm!
” “I can't. He's got me in a headlock.” “Well, then, pinch his ass!” Ass pinching was acceptable torture. Likewise, foot tickling. The kids constantly shrieked and jerked spastically, kicking away from Joe's fingers scrabbling in their armpits. Gently, he tossed them all over the place. Constantly, he pinned down one kid, and, like a moustachioed black-hatted villain tormenting a railroad-tracked victim, he threatened to do horrible damage. But the free child always pounced to the rescue in the nick of time, leaping on Joe's back, bowling him over, and hollering, “I gots him,
get away!
”

Joe loved it. What cornball theater! He gasped, gurgled, grunted, groaned, hissed, wheezed, whimpered, threatened, and pleaded. It was rough play, yet they rarely got hurt. Everyone understood the physical limits of the game. In fact, as he flopped and tussled, Joe felt almost relaxed. He loved the way they became intertangled in a big ball of fulminating arms and legs. Especially he loved the absolute thrill wrestling gave to Michael and Heather. Their eyes sparkled with champagne energy. They pranced, swatted, and danced like cavorting kittens. Joe believed this wrestling was the biggest immediate pleasure he could give his kids.

In the heart of this particular frenzied loving tussle, Joe started drifting. Tranquillity settled into his body as the kids tugged on his arms and legs. The world became a sunny place, and easy to comprehend: gentle, innocent, compassionate. He fantasized that he should do this for a living: Joe Miniver, Professional Wrestler of Children. They were contorted amorously around each other in a delirious helium atmosphere, lighter than air, wonderfully insouciant and happy. Joe threatened to commit unbelievably horrible mayhem upon their wiry little bodies; he became inebriated on their giggles. Oh wow, he thought. Everything's gonna be all right! Heather and Michael, Renaissance angels, fluttered their creamy golden wings, and collided against his body like enormous holiday kisses.

Bam!

The usual, sickening collision. Even without seeing it, Joe knew that the back of Heather's head had crunched into Michael's broken nose.

For a second, the usual stunned silence ensued—that hesitant, totally dead period before the squall. And then:

Not noise, so much, as blood. As if a gigantic pig-bladder hanging over their heads and full of the stuff had been stabbed open with a knife, they were—all three of them—instantly drenched in crimson. Then they rolled away from each other, Heather in tears, Michael on his knees, his head against the mattress and his ass in the air, making queer, shocked, guttural sounds. Finally, maybe ten seconds after the fact, Joe heard Heidi's shout:
“Oh no!”

In the next instant, it seemed as if ever since the kids' births, his life had been a series of traumatic emergency situations interspersed with a series of drills preparing for traumatic situations. Heather commenced bawling, not from hurt, but because she had caused such damage, and knew that the best way to stave off blame was to feign pain and hysteria. Michael was in too much agony to cry. Spouting blood, he allowed himself to be grabbed, hoisted, and carted unceremoniously down to the car by his father, while his mother trailed behind wailing, “Oh God! I'm sorry! You were right! I'm sorry! Oh God!”

How sweet it is!
a tiny portion of Joe's brain managed to gloat through all his emergency adrenaline.
Vengeance is mine!

*   *   *

T
HE BUS STARTER
clicked and went dead. Frantically, Joe grabbed the pliers, clobbered his head diving under the right rear tire, jumped the starter, scrambled back into the car, and—
brrrroooom!
—they were off.

Juan Fangio, starring in—dahdle-a-
dah
-de-
dah … charge!—A Race Against Death!
They made it, as somehow they always did, to the hospital. And burst through the emergency-entrance door. As usual, nobody was on duty. No nurse, no doctor, no ambulance driver, no paramedic. Nobody but a janitor maneuvering a mop and a bucket was on hand to stem the bloody flow.

Heidi pressed a soaked T-shirt to Michael's face while Joe raced off to locate a doctor, a nurse, an anybody. Yet no one moved in the hallways; the head nurse's station was deserted. An eerie air of vacuity permeated the hospital. My kid will bleed to death, Joe thought in a panic, because today is some kind of special hospital holiday:

PRESIDENT PROCLAIMS NATIONAL DOCTORS' GOLFING TUESDAY
!

Desperately, he pushed open the nearest door and plummeted inside. Nikita Smatterling (seated in a chair beside a vase of colorful carnations on the night table near Ephraim Bonatelli's slightly raised bed) looked up without demonstrable surprise. Ephraim himself, clothed from head to toe in a chartreuse jumpsuit and looking decidedly chipper, sat in the lotus position on his own pillow. On the other side of the bed, Ray Verboten reacted to Joe's precipitous entry by clapping his Resistol onto his head and leaping upright. Egon Braithwhite had been standing at the foot of the bed, nearest the door—he turned, startled, and exclaimed: “Pi shidonoi bessi mamaba!” Beside him stood the stoop-shouldered little shtarker himself, Nick Danger. His suitcase lay on the foot of the bed—its lid raised—facing away from Joe.

“Whoops, pardon me!” Joe spun a hundred and eighty degrees, yanking shut the door as he bolted away.

A nurse emerged from the ladies' can. Grabbing her arm, Joe stammered “My kid…!” Almost at a run, he led her to the emergency-room area, where she dialed the doctor on call: he was in the middle of dinner.

“I just remembered,” Joe gasped.

“What?” Heidi hugged Michael tightly, stroking his hair, whispering, “It's okay, lovebird, it's okay.”

“What I planned to say when I began that story about the freak who was mugged into vegetablehood.”

“Joe, I think this is hardly the time—”

“Spumoni said it was his own fault for putting out a lousy karma.”

“Whose own fault?”

“The freak's. He said it was
his own fault
for getting beaten to a pulp, because he must have been putting out really lousy karma.”

“Who said—?”

“Spumoni Tatarsky. And Jeff Orbison agreed. Can you believe
that
?”

Now came the Incredible Coincidence. Hurrying through the emergency-room door, little Bradley screaming to high heaven in her arms with one of his eyes already swollen shut and yellowing like a puffing grapefruit, came Nancy Ryan. Her face radiated serene concern; a cigarette dangled from her lips. Her outfit consisted of a blue terrycloth bathrobe and embroidered Chinese slippers.

Settling beside Joe, she noticed Michael's crimson deluge and shouted (in order to be heard over Bradley's hysterics): “My God, what happened?”

“We were wrestling!”

“What about the doctor?”

“He's coming! What happened to Bradley?”

“I was in the bath! Somehow he caught the parakeet, threw it into the dryer, and turned on the machine! It was cooked to a crisp by the time I discovered it! So I spanked him for the first time in—three years, I guess! Enraged, he ran outside, picked up a big rock, and smashed himself in the face with it!”

In this way, Joe thought (seated between the two women and their may-hemmed offspring), America is busy building the leaders of tomorrow. For only upon the firm foundation of today's healthy youngsters can the civilized glory of our manifestly destined future be assured.

*   *   *

D
R
. P
HIL
H
ORNEY
arrived; confusion ensued. Both Joe and Heidi wished to enter the ER with their wounded child, but Heather wasn't allowed. She threw a fit when ordered to remain in the corridor, inhaling Nancy's smoke and Bradley's eardrum-shattering howls. So Heidi accompanied Michael, and Joe stayed outside, seated in a vomit-orange plastic cafeteria chair, flanked by a grim and martyrish Heather, and Nancy and her hysterical offspring.

Right off the bat, Nancy's incredibly blasé style threw him for a loop. Unperturbed by the howling dervish beside her, she chain-smoked, smiled cheerfully, and seemed totally disinterested in her son's predicament. She neither ordered Bradley to clam up nor offered much solace. Joe quite admired her aplomb. Especially as she seemed much more intent, now that Heidi had departed the field of battle, on furthering their relationship however possible, given (of course) the limitations of these awkward circumstances.

“My God,” she whispered conspiratorially, “have I ever missed you since yesterday morning! How did you feel after our sex together?”

“Very nervous,” Joe admitted uncomfortably.

“I felt heavenly. That was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”

Speaking out the side of his mouth (to frustrate Heather's flapping ears), Joe said, “Well, it wasn't bad, I'll admit.”

“Our baby is going to be the most beautiful child created between two people ever,” she murmured blissfully. Bradley continued his alarmingly shrill protestations, and Joe's eardrums started to ache.

His heart also went
k-flomp!
at the mention of “our” baby.

“Hey, Nancy, what are you talking about? I didn't even—”

“A woman knows.” She exhaled luxuriously, as if they were actually conversing in a relaxed and sensual manner after a particularly gratifying lay, while stretched languorously between pristine linen coverlets.

“I don't want any baby.”

“How can you speak like that after our times together?”

“Nancy, I want to cut it off. Break up. End the relationship. I don't know what happened.”

She smiled her lazy, know-it-all, heavy-lidded, come-on affectation. “I do.”