Chapter Five
Sluggo doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Or maybe he does. I mean, somewhere in all of that unfiltered honesty there may be a glimmer of substance. I don’t know.
That day when I kyboshed the plans for my condo, I spent a couple of hours in the emergency room, where they removed three of Gwen’s fingernails from my cheek and replaced them with eight stitches. I think they were fake nails, but Gwen and I haven’t been in touch since the incident so I can’t be totally sure. Anyway, I was bleeding pretty bad after Gwen blitzkrieg'd me, so one of the security guys scooted me out of the apartment and drove me straight to the emergency room. In all the rush, I didn’t think to grab my iPhone.
The emergency room doctors got me in and stitched up pretty quick, but I had to stay put in the curtain-cubicle for fifteen minutes so the nurses could be sure I wouldn’t pass out at departure. It was probably the first extended period of time that I hadn’t had my phone with me since college. No calls, no e-mails, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter.
I knew that life was going on outside the hospital. It was just going on without me. All I could do was sit in that curtain-cubicle and think about why I wanted to live in a big, empty, brick-and-concrete box instead of the next gen of next gen daily-living high-tech apartments, think about why that big brick-and-concrete box with exterior pipes and electrical wires seemed so right to me.
When the nurses released me, I walked back out to the waiting room and sat down there. If I’d had my phone, I would have probably just called an UBER. But instead, I held off from asking the desk nurse to call me a taxi and just sat there thinking. Tried to figure out what I was feeling. It wasn’t the stitches or the anesthetic that were making me feel different.
Eventually I realized what I was feeling. I was feeling undistracted. Not distracted. Whatever the right word for it, I was experiencing it… right there, right then. Nothing was taking me away from the now of the hospital waiting room.
I sat there amazed at how rare that type of moment had become.
I looked around the waiting room and saw this kid – maybe seventeen or eighteen – lying on a gurney, waiting to be taken into the operating room. The kid had what looked like a vinyl floor tile sticking straight out the side of his skull. The kid was wide awake and didn’t appear to be in any pain. In fact, he looked normal. Aside from the floor tile embedded in his head, I mean. He saw me staring and flashed a peace sign with his fingers. I responded with the same gesture.
After they’d wheeled him into the operating room, I got up and asked the nurse if I could pay the kid’s deductibles, or whatever medical expenses were outstanding. I’m not sure why I wanted to pay the kid’s medical bills, but money isn’t an issue so I decided to just go with the impulse. The nurse said thanks and told me that the kid was fully covered. He needed nothing from me. Another superficial relationship. The kid is in and out of my life in a blink, even in the here-and-now of the hospital waiting room.
I asked the nurse to call me a taxi. I never found out if the kid with the vinyl floor tile embedded in his skull lived or died.
Instead of going back to my old apartment in Manhattan where all my stuff was, I took the taxi to my new, unfinished apartment in Jersey City where Gwen had attacked me earlier in the day. The security guards were very accommodating when I returned, not a huge surprise considering I own the building and had so recently been attacked on their watch. Not that they could have done anything to prevent it.
When I walked back into my double-high, double wide brick-and-concrete box on the fourth floor, the first thing I did was find my phone. I had six missed calls, which I thought was a little sparse considering the fact that a crazed interior designer had attacked and mildly disfigured me only a few hours ago. I had thirty-two new texts, seventy-four new e-mails (mostly junk, I imagine) and twelve of my apps were showing some kind of new update or message for me. I looked down at my phone, but didn’t click on any of the icons.
Then I walked to the front of the apartment, slid open my huge bay window and side-armed my phone into the Hudson River.
As I watched my phone frisbee out towards the water, I thought about the kid with the floor tile embedded in his skull and answered my own nagging question of how the hell could something like that have possibly happened. Whoever frisbee’d the floor tile into that kid’s skull must feel pretty bad right now.
I grabbed a block of wood and walked to the middle of the concrete ice rink that was my floor. I lay down, resting my head on the block of wood, and looked around at the giant brick-and-concrete box I’d saved from so much pointless technology earlier that same day. I wasn’t distracted.
I didn’t know exactly what would happen next, but I knew what would not happen next. I would not get a new phone. I would not retrieve my laptop from my old apartment. I would not update, post or like anything.
It’s not that I have anything against technology. I mean, technology has been very good to me. But I felt like it was necessary for me to take a step back. A step even further back than kyboshing the voice recognition lighting, heating, sound and security that I’d saved my brick-and-concrete box from only a few hours earlier.
Then and there, I decided to divest myself of everything that is digital technology. For how long, I didn’t know. Maybe a day or a week or a month. Maybe forever. But lying in my giant brick-and-concrete box, it seemed like the right thing to do. And that sense of right-here-right-now that I’d experienced in the hospital waiting room – that same feeling of experiencing right-here-right-now – seemed to grow as I made my decision.
Chapter Six
“You’re an idiot.”
Drunk, actually, is what I am. We’ve been at this bar Mike’s Place for two hours drinking Irish whiskey. Whoever Sluggo wanted me to meet, it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing them tonight.
I am worse for the wear, while Sluggo looks like he could competently drive a school bus full of kindergarteners on a field trip. I need to get drunk more frequently, raise my tolerance for alcohol.
“Just take a breath and try to understan’ what I’m saying,” I whine. I know I’m drunk because I never whine when I’m sober.
“I understand what you’re saying. It’s why I called you an idiot.”