Brass Hook
Brass Hook
A Michael Lee short story
July 28, 18
J.P. Grant, the great great great grandson of Ulysses Grant (okay 7 generations since U.S. Grant), is 36 years old and not truly doing much with his life other than working a nine to five dead-end job, growing old, and putting the minimum into his retirement fund against his mother’s weekly encouragements. He has a five-acre homestead and a few livestock animals that cost more than they are worth. His father stops by most days to tend to the animals while J.P. is at work, has been known to name the chickens here and there, and only charges a few eggs a day for his services.
J.P. Grant woke late Saturday morning, like most other Saturdays this year; still drunk from the night before and head spinning. He rolled out of bed, tangled in worn cotton sheets onto the floor; his head hitting the nightstand on the way down before his arms could free themselves from the sleep-made straight jacket, created after a night of drunkenly tossing and turning. Pushing the nightstand over with his head, his phone and lamp crashed to the carpet with him; he groaned with regret, had no desire to untangle himself, or to get up off the cool floor. Grant lay there on the soft matted carpet saying to himself for the first time “never again.”
His phone lay on the ground, the speaker as close to his ear canal as possible without actually being in his ear, began to ring at full volume. Grant rolled over with a start; struggled to untangle his arms and lifting himself up on his elbows threw up in his mouth a little bit, swallowed then grabbed his phone and said hoarsely. “Hello, mom.”
“Where the hell are you John Paul? Have you been smoking cigarettes? You sound like you’ve been smoking! Your dad’s birthday is today and you two were supposed to go fishing! Remember?” She said as unhappily as any mom could sound when her son misses an important outing with dad.
“Mom, I don’t smoke and Dad’s birthday is tomorrow, not today.”
“No John! It’s today! You are five hours late; your dad said just come out to the lake and he will come to get you in the boat. Maybe you can salvage his day. So get your ass up and go meet your father before I come over there! Don’t forget his present either, you forgot it last year, and even though he didn’t say anything I just know it hurt him.” She exclaimed.
“Okay ma, I’ll be there in a little while. Can you call him and tell him I’ll be there?” Grant asked knowing that if he called his dad, he’d be told not to worry about coming so late in the morning.
“Yes, J. P. I’ll let him know you are on your way.”
Grant got along with his parents pretty well and didn’t actually mind going fishing with his pops a few times a year. He didn’t forget the present this year either. A brass fishing hook with “Love you Dad” engraved along the side of it. So yeah, not a real hook. It’s one of the hat clip hooks but J.P. got a quality one that his dad wouldn’t mind keeping around for a while.
Grant got up off the floor, not stepping too far from his bed, looked around his room for a clean shirt to wear. He hadn’t always been so messy, or even a drunk, seeing his room like this made him feel gross inside. His eyes still a little blurry, mouth dry and filmy he could feel the room spin just a little before falling to the bed and going back to dreamless drunken slumber.
“Hey, son. Wake up. We need to talk.” Grants father said calmly as he gently rocked his son’s shoulders as to not surprise the sleeping young man half off the bed like he had just fallen there.
Grant opened his eyes a little thinking he was dreaming, then sprang up shouting. “ah shit dad I am so frickin sorry! I didn’t mean to go back to bed for real. What time is it?”
Grant’s father looked at him brokenheartedly, chin down he said. “It’s 3pm son.”
“Hey dad, you know, let me get cleaned up, maybe we can go get an early dinner or something, please let me make it up to you.”
“That sounds good but we still need to have a little talk before we go anywhere okay.”
Grant nodded his head, grabbed the clothes he attempted to put on earlier, and rushed to the shower leaving his dad in the bedroom doorway still glum-looking.
“Hey Dad, how did you get in the house?” Grant yelled from the shower. His father didn’t yell anything back and Grant figured he was a bit too far to hear him or was watching the news by now. Grant got out of the shower just as the steam finished filling the bathroom, dried off with a towel that still smelled fresh from the laundry mat then took a blow dryer to the bathroom mirror to dry away the fog. J.P. Grant didn’t have the dad-bod of his friends and still checked himself out in the mirror after every shower, asking himself where the beach was and what the shape of the world was even on his worst days.
“Hey, dad, where you want to eat?” Grant said while trying to shave off a week’s worth of hair with a two-dollar razor. He finished getting ready skipping the hair gel and settling for the trucker hat his dad got him last Christmas, blank with just a patch sewn on the front displaying a colorful rooster, and headed to the kitchen passing his living room where his dad was patiently watching the news, turned up just loud enough to drowned out a shower, waiting for his only son to hurry along. Grant rifled through the fridge trying to find something to drink to get the strange taste out of his mouth. Two cans of cola sat in the back of the fridge. One of the cans said in cursive along its side “Share one with dad.” Grant rolled his eyes and said to himself “just rub it in why don’t you.”
“Hey dad, you never said how you got in or where you want to go eat,” Grant said curiously as he walked from the kitchen to the living room sitting on the couch across from his recliner that his dad was occupying. His dad’s head was down and his eyes were closed and a house key on his knee. Grant smiled, cracked open the can just right to make it noisy but not spray soda everywhere, took a sip of his drink, and looked around at his clean house. “Hey there sleepy head, you cleaned my whole fricken house? I’m going to miss more family gatherings if you keep that up.”
Grant sat back and smiled; he was holding the brass fishing hook so when his dad looked up he wouldn’t be able to miss it. Thinking to himself, “Shit, my dad can be so damn cool sometimes.” His dad just lay reclined back as still as could be, the news lady on TV was complaining about something, and Grants eyes grew big body lunging forward.
“Oh fuck… DAD!”
Why you so mean Michael?
You know what?
More often than not, I don’t want to bother or be bothered by anyone, and it’s not for any other reason than; I’m introverted as hell and I am content just doing what I need to do to get through the day and don’t mind being lost in my own world. I love taking pictures- pictures of the world through a glass lens for free and pictures of really sick hearts with piezoelectric crystals for a fee. I like sick hearts because I know that the person will most likely be on a vent and I won’t have to talk to anyone, (except on days when the nurses feel extra chatty about the last tech who just ruined their day because they were oh so busy and the tech was oh so needy {nod my head and smile}). These extra sick patients also tend to, but not always, have other underlying problems that most people don’t want to deal with in a normal shift (TB, C-Diff, or the ever dreaded scabies) so I take them with glee in my heart. I feel like as I get older I could go an entire day without saying a word to anyone, except when it comes to AIDET, and no one would be the wiser. I’m actually trying it out in small amounts here and there as a test to my will power to remain silent and to not get myself fired when all I wanted to do was work and not talk about how our new sanitizing wipes are turning our brand new machines cigarette smoke yellow from their original medical grade white.
Hmmm. I almost really don’t even feel like writing this here right now.
Today I get to work ready to rock and roll after stopping at Publix to get some eye drops, and there it is, the same old same, no one is doing enough, work harder, give us more, do this and don’t do that or else and then a well written “GO TEAM GO!”. That isn’t how I wanted to start my shift. I’d prefer just saying hi to our great secretaries, maybe bat my eyes at them so they smile at my ugly mug and page me when there are cool stat studies that need to be done, getting my supplies, cleaning my machine if someone else touched it while I was away at jury duty, and going to work. Really, there are times I feel like I am losing my love for what I do when the chiefs forget we are working with sick humans who have people who love and care for them looking over our shoulders asking ten thousand questions and not just numbers on a computer screen. They see an MRN and I see a grandma ready to leave her grandkids forever, they see one more test for the bottom line and I see someone who had a clot found by echo, then dissolved with meds and can now go home after one last look inside and a high five. I don’t want to lose feeling of holy crap that guy who is doing laps around the unit today because I called a doctor about something I saw and didn’t let him off the phone until he said he’ll call someone as soon as we hang up, but if I won’t let him off the phone there is nothing he can do. “Use your cell phone I’m staying on the line.”
Today, some, my wife and kids, coworkers, that homeless guy who asked for a sip of my coffee, could say I was walking around with a chip on my shoulder. (I didn’t sleep well last night and calling out isn’t an option.) Half way through the day while chanting to myself “I need to shave my face to save a life, 8 shaves a day keeps the bankers away.” I had to go to the heart transplant unit to do an echo on a post transplant patient. Some post transplants have awesome pictures and some make you want to quit your job. This lady I had to do – we will call Betsy (after my dog whom I like a lot… give me a break. I needed a name and the dog was biting my ponytail so bam). Betsy was laying in the oh so comfortable hospital bed with blinders on trying to catch some z’s and here I come with my big fancy brand new yellow and white machine. Betsy was happy to see me since she had been waiting for an echo for a couple days now. I introduced myself and she remembered me from before her transplant. Yes I get to see the before and afters a lot. I set up my machine, hooked up my lead wires to synchronize my cine loops to her heart, lubed up the probe with freezing cold gel and started the echo. Betsy lay there asleep; while imaged her heart, I was about fifteen pictures in to the test and I hit the continuous wave Doppler and Betsy hears her new heart for the first time. Continuous Wave Doppler listens to the blood moving inside a persons heart along a chosen beam path and creates an audible sound that can be heard by anyone near enough to care.
She gasps for air, says “Is that my heart?” while quickly lifting her blindfold to see what I was seeing. I say “yes that’s your heart”.
I turn the over sized and underused screen so she can see better; I exit out of Doppler and showed her the black and white grainy 2 dimensional image of her new heart. I tell her what she sees is her heart in motion and I don’t make eye contact with her as she begins to weep. She rested her hand on my hand that held the imaging probe and, she sobbed and asked again “Is that really my heart? It’s so beautiful.”
She cried some more and I held the image for her to see as long as she desired. A few minutes past and as her breathing normalized I was about to continue my study and she asked. “Can I hear it again?”
“Heck yeah you can.”
I turned up the volume and Dopplered the heck out of her heart. I took my time imaging Betsy’s heart while she cried herself to sleep today because my time with her was way more important than a “we expect eight studies a day damnit.”
Betsy expected one study today and that is what I gave her. This lady got to see and hear her new heart pump her blood through her body and will never forget that. (she recorded a few seconds on her cell phone.)
Betsy is why I do echos, vent patients keep me away from the masses and my coworkers so they only think I’m a jerk and not given the chance to see me be a jerk.
Introverted empaths unite… well maybe tomorrow.
Michael Trump 