The Water-Method Man

In the operating room there was a stunning, full-bosomed woman in a green uniform like the kind all the surgery nurses wear, and she kept pinching my thighs and smiling at me. She was the one who stuck the needle leading to the dextrose jug into my vein; then she bent my arm in a special way, taped the needle to it, and then taped my arm to the table. The dextrose running down the yellowy hose was gurgling into me; I could follow it right down to my arm.

I had a thought about Merrill Overturf: If they had ever operated on him, they wouldn't be able to use dextrose, would they, since it's mostly sugar? What would they use?

With my free right hand, I reached over and pinched my penis. I could still feel everything, and this frightened me a lot. What was the sense of putting my thighs to sleep?

Then I heard Vigneron's voice, but I couldn't see him; instead, I saw a short, genial, spectacled old geezer who I guessed was the anesthetist. He came over and poked at the dextrose needle, then slid a jug of Pentothal alongside the dextrose jug and ran the hose from it right alongside the dextrose hose. Rather than stick the Pentothal needle in me, he stuck it into the dextrose hose, which I thought was very clever.

The hose to the Pentothal had a clamp on it, and I saw that the drug wasn't running into me yet. I watched it closely, you can bet your ass, and when the anesthetist asked me how I felt, I boomed in a great loud voice that I still had plenty of feeling in my prick and that I hoped they were all aware of it.

But they all just smiled as if they hadn't heard me - that anesthetist, the green nurse and Vigneron himself, now standing over me.

'Count to twelve,' the anesthetist told me. He started the Pentothal running then, by unclamping the hose, and I watched the stuff trickle down until it mingled with the dextrose in the main rubber vein.

'One two three four five six seven,' I said very fast. Only it took forever. The Pentothal changed the color of the dextrose running down toward my arm. I watched it run right up to the hub of the needle, and when it entered my arm, I cried, 'Eight!'

Then a second passed, which took two hours, and I woke up in the postoperative room - the recovery room, whose ceiling looked so much like the ceiling in the operating room that I thought I was still in the same place. Hovering over me was the same stunning green nurse, smiling.

'Nine,' I said to her, 'ten, eleven, twelve ...'

'We'd like you to try to urinate now,' she said to me.

'I just went,' I said. But she rolled me over on my side and slid a green pan under me.

'Please just try,' she coaxed. She was awfully nice.

So I started to go, even though I was sure I had nothing to pee. When the pain came, it was like an awareness of someone else's pain in another room - or even more distant, in another hospital. It was quite a lot of pain; I felt sorry for the person enduring it; I was all through peeing before I realized that it was my pain, realized that the operation was over.

'OK, OK, OK, now,' the nurse said, smoothing back my hair and wiping the sudden, surprised tears off my face.

Of course, what they had spared me was the double pain of anticipating peeing that first time. But I couldn't see it that way. It was a betrayal; they had tricked me.

Then I went away again into dizzy sleep, and when I came back I was in my hospital room, Tulpen sitting there beside the bed, holding my hand. When I opened my eyes, she was smiling at me.

But I pretended that I was still drugged senseless. I stared right through her. There's more than one who can play the tricks and surprises, you can bet your ass ...

32

Another Dante, a Different Hell

THE DRIVER HAD worked for the limousine service for about three years. Before that, he'd driven a cab. He liked the limousine service better; nobody tried to stick him up or maul him, it was more leisurely, and the cars were elegant. He'd had the Mercedes for the past year and he loved to drive it. Occasionally, he'd gotten out of the city - once as far as New Haven - and he loved the feel of the car on the open road. That was what he thought the 'open road' was: driving to New Haven. It was as far as he'd ever been out of New York City. He had a family and three kids, and every summer he talked with his wife about taking his vacation out West, driving the whole family out there. But he didn't own a car himself; he was waiting until he could afford a Mercedes, or until the limousine service let an old one go cheap.

So when he contracted to drive Bogus to Maine, the driver undertook the journey as if someone had told him to drive to San Francisco. Maine! He thought of men who hunted whale

s, ate lobster for breakfast and wore rubber boots all year long.

He talked for two hours before he realized that his passenger was either asleep or in a trance; then he shut up. His name was Dante Calicchio, and he realized that this was the first time since he'd stopped driving a cab that he was spooked by a passenger. He thought that Bogus was crazy, and he put the hundred-dollar bill in his jockey shorts, right in the pouch where he could find it. Maybe he'll give me another one, he thought. Or try to take this one back.

Dante Calicchio was short and heavy, with a salad of black hair and a nose which had been broken so many times that it appeared to flap. He'd been a boxer; he liked to say of his style that he always led with his nose. He'd been a wrestler too, and had cauliflower ears from that. A lovely set, all folded and swollen and lumpy, like two unmatched wads of dough slapped on the sides of his face. He chewed gum loudly, a habit he'd developed years ago when he gave up cigarettes.

Dante Calicchio was an honest man who was curious about the way other people lived and what other places were like to live in, so he was not unhappy to be driving this nut to Maine. It was just that when they got north of Boston, and it was dark, and the traffic thinned out and almost disappeared, he got a little scared about driving off into this wilderness with a man who hadn't opened his mouth since they'd passed Shea Stadium.

The toll-booth attendant at the New Hampshire Turnpike looked at Dante's chauffeur uniform, stared into the plush back seat at Bogus in a trance, and then, since there were no other cars in sight, asked Dante where he was going.

'Maine,' Dante whispered as if it was a holy word. 'Where in Maine?' the attendant asked. Maine, in general, was only twenty minutes away from his daily life.

'I don't know where,' Dante said, as the attendant handed him his change and waved him on. 'Hey, sir?' he said, turning to Bogus. 'Hey, where in Maine?'

Georgetown is an island, but in Trumper's mind it was even more of an island than it really is. It's the sort of island that might as well be a peninsula, because it's connected to the mainland by a bridge; there are none of the inconveniences of a real island. But Trumper was thinking of the lovely isolation Couth contributed to the place. But then Couth could probably give you a sense of isolation in Kennedy Airport.