Skeleton Crew (60 page)

It’s so hot in here. And I don’t like the sounds in the walls.

Yes, I love.

And true love will never die.

Walking to school you ask me
what other schools have grades.

 

I get as far as Fruit Street and your eyes go away.

 

As we walk under these yellow trees
you have your army lunch box under one arm and your
short legs, dressed in combat fatigues,
make your shadow into a scissors
that cuts nothing on the sidewalk.

 

You tell me suddenly that all the students there are fruits.

 

Everyone picks on the blueberries because they are so small.
The bananas, you say, are patrol boys.
In your eyes I see homerooms of oranges,
assemblies of apples.

 

All, you say, have arms and legs

 

and the watermelons are often tardy.
They waddle, and they are fat.
“Like me,” you say.

I could tell you things but better not.

 

That watermelon children cannot tie their own shoes;
the plums do it for them.
Or how I steal your face—
steal it, steal it, and wear it for my own.
It wears out fast on my face.

 

It’s the stretching that does it.
I could tell you that dying’s an art
and I am learning fast.
In that school I think you have already
picked up your own pencil
and begun to write your name.

 

Between now and then I suppose we could
someday play you truant and drive over to Fruit Street
and I could park in a rain of these October leaves
and we could watch a banana escort the last tardy watermelon
through those tall doors.

S
ooner
or
later the question comes up in every medical student’s career. How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? Different instructors answer the question in different ways, but cut to its base level, the answer is always another question: How
badly does the patient want to survive?

Two days since the storm washed me up. I paced the island off just this morning. Some island! It is 190 paces wide at its thickest point, and 267 paces long from tip to tip.

So far as I can tell, there is nothing on it to eat.

My name is Richard Pine. This is my diary. If I’m found
(when),
I can destroy this easily enough. There is no shortage of matches. Matches and heroin. Plenty of both. Neither of them worth doodlysquat here, ha-ha. So I will write. It will pass the time, anyway.

If I’m to tell the whole truth-and why not? I sure have the time!—I’ll have to start by saying I was born Richard Pinzetti, in New York’s Little Italy. My father was an Old World guinea. I wanted to be a surgeon. My father would laugh, call me crazy, and tell me to get him another glass of wine. He died of cancer when he was forty-six. I was glad.

I played football in high school. I was the best damn football player my school ever produced. Quarterback. I made All-City my last two years. I hated football. But if you’re a poor wop from the projects and you want to go to college, sports are your only ticket. So I played, and I got my athletic scholarship.

In college I only played ball until my grades were good enough to get a full academic scholarship. Pre-med. My father died six weeks before graduation. Good deal. Do you think I wanted to walk across that stage and get my diploma and look down and see that fat greaseball sitting there? Does a hen want a flag? I got into a fraternity, too. It wasn’t one of the good ones, not with a name like Pinzetti, but a fraternity all the same.

Why am I writing this? It’s almost funny. No, I take that back. It is funny. The great Dr. Pine, sitting on a rock in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, sitting on an island almost small enough to spit across, writing his life story. Am I hungry! Never mind, I’ll write my goddam life story if I want to. At least it keeps my mind off my stomach. Sort of.

I changed my name to Pine before I started med school. My mother said I was breaking her heart. What heart? The day after my old man was in the ground, she was out hustling that Jew grocer down at the end of the block. For someone who loved the name so much, she was in one hell of a hurry to change her copy of it to Steinbrunner.

Surgery was all I ever wanted. Ever since high school. Even then I was wrapping my hands before every game and soaking them afterward. If you want to be a surgeon, you have to take care of your hands. Some of the kids used to rag me about it, call me chickenshit. I never fought them. Playing football was risk enough. But there were ways. The one that got on my case the most was Howie Plotsky, a big dumb bohunk with zits all over his face. I had a paper route, and I was selling the numbers along with the papers. I had a little coming in lots of ways. You get to know people, you listen, you make connections. You have to, when you’re hustling the street. Any asshole knows how to die. The thing to learn is how to survive, you know what I mean? So I paid the biggest kid in school, Ricky
Brazzi,
ten bucks to make Howie Plotsky’s mouth disappear. Make it disappear, I said. I will pay you a dollar for every tooth you bring me. Rico brought me three teeth wrapped up in a paper towel. He dislocated two of his knuckles doing the job, so you see the kind of trouble I could have got into.

In med school while the other suckers were running themselves ragged trying to bone up—no pun intended, ha-ha-between waiting tables or selling neckties or buffing floors, I kept the rackets going. Football pools, basketball pools, a little policy. I stayed on good terms with the old neighborhood. And I got through school just fine.

I didn’t get into pushing until I was doing my residency. I was working in one of the biggest hospitals in New York City. At first it was just prescription blanks. I’d sell a tablet of a hundred blanks to some guy from the neighborhood, and he’d forge the names of forty or fifty different doctors on them, using writing samples I’d also sell him. The guy would turn around and peddle the blanks on the street for ten or twenty dollars apiece. The speed freaks and the nodders loved it.

And after a while I found out just how much of a balls-up the hospital drug room was in. Nobody knew what was coming in or going out. There were people lugging the goodies out by the double handfuls. Not me. I was always careful. I never got into trouble until I got careless-and unlucky. But I’m going to land on my feet. I always do.

Can’t write any more now. My wrist’s tired and the pencil’s dull. I don’t know why I’m bothering, anyway. Somebody’ ll probably pick me up soon.

The boat drifted away last night and sank in about ten feet of water off the north side of the island. Who gives a rip? The bottom was like Swiss cheese after coming over the reef anyway. I’d already taken off anything that was worth taking. Four gallons of water. A sewing kit. A first-aid kit. This book I’m writing in, which is supposed to be a lifeboat inspection log. That’s a laugh. Whoever heard of a lifeboat with no FOOD on it? The last report written in here is August 8, 1970. Oh, yes, two knives, one dull and one fairly sharp, one combination fork and spoon. I’ll use them when I eat my supper tonight. Roast rock. Ha-ha. Well, I did get my pencil sharpened.

When I get off this pile of guano-splattered rock, I’m going to sue the bloody hell out of Paradise Lines, Inc. That alone is worth living for. And I am going to live. I’m going to get out of this. Make no mistake about it. I am going to get out of this.

 

When I was making my inventory, I forgot one thing: two kilos of pure heroin, worth about $350,000, New York street value. Here it’s worth el zilcho. Sort of funny, isn’t it? Ha-ha!

Well, I’ve eaten-if you want to call that eating. There was a gull perched on one of the rocks at the center of the island. The rocks are all jumbled up into a kind of mini-mountain there-all covered with birdshit, too. I got a chunk of stone that just fitted into my hand and climbed up as close to it as I dared. It just stood there on its rock, watching me with its bright black eyes. I’m surprised that the rumbling of my stomach didn’t scare it off.

I threw the rock as hard as I could and hit it broadside. It let out a loud squawk and tried to fly away, but I’d broken its right wing. I scrambled up after it and it hopped away. I could see the blood trickling over its white feathers. The son of a bitch led me a merry chase; once, on the other side of the central rockpile, I got my foot caught in a hole between two rocks and nearly fractured my ankle.

It began to tire at last, and I finally caught it on the east side of the island. It was actually trying to get into the water and paddle away. I caught a handful of its tailfeathers and it turned around and pecked me. Then I had one hand around its feet. I got my other hand on its miserable neck and broke it. The sound gave me great satisfaction. Lunch is served, you know? Ha! Ha!

I carried it back to my “camp,” but even before I plucked and gutted it, I used iodine to swab the laceration its beak had made. Birds carry all sorts of germs, and the last thing I need now is an infection.

The operation on the gull went quite smoothly. I could not cook it, alas. Absolutely no vegetation or driftwood on the island and the boat has sunk. So I ate it raw. My stomach wanted to regurgitate it immediately. I sympathized but could not allow it. I counted backward until the nausea passed. It almost always works.

Can you imagine that bird, almost breaking my ankle and then pecking me? If I catch another one tomorrow, I’ll torture it. I let this one off too easily. Even as I write, I am able to glance down at its severed head on the sand. Its black eyes, even with the death-glaze on them, seem to be mocking me.

Do gulls have brains in any quantity?

Are they edible?

No chow today. One gull landed near the top of the rockpile but flew off before I could get close enough to “throw it a forward pass,” ha-ha! I’ve started a beard. Itches like hell. If the gull comes back and I get it, I’m going to cut its eyes out before I kill it.

I was one hell of a surgeon, as I believe I may have said. They drummed me out. It’s a laugh, really; they all do it, and they’re so bloody sanctimonious when someone gets caught at it. Screw you, Jack, I got mine. The Second Oath of Hippocrates and Hypocrites.

I had enough socked away from my adventures as an intern and a resident (that’s supposed to be like an officer and a gentleman according to the Oath of Hypocrites, but don’t you believe it) to set myself up in practice on Park Avenue. A good thing for me, too; I had no rich daddy or established patron, as so many of my “colleagues” did. By the time my shingle was out, my father was nine years in his pauper’s grave. My mother died the year before my license to practice was revoked.

It was a kickback thing. I had a deal going with half a dozen East Side pharmacists, with two drug supply houses, and with at least twenty other doctors. Patients were sent to me and I sent patients. I performed operations and prescribed the correct post-op drugs. Not all the operations were necessary, but I never performed one against a patient’s will. And I never had a patient look down at what was written on the prescrip blank and say, “I don’t want this.” Listen: they’d have a hysterectomy in 1965 or a partial thyroid in 1970, and still be taking painkillers five or ten years later, if you’d let them. Sometimes I did. I wasn’t the only one, you know. They could afford the habit. And sometimes a patient would have trouble sleeping after minor surgery. Or trouble getting diet pills. Or Librium. It could all be arranged. Ha! Yes! If they hadn’t gotten it from me, they would have gotten it from someone else.

Then the tax people got to Lowenthal. That sheep. They waved five years in his face and he coughed up half a dozen names. One of them was mine. They watched me for a while, and by the time they landed, I was worth a lot more than five years. There were a few other deals, including the prescription blanks, which I hadn’t given up entirely. It’s funny, I didn’t really need that stuff anymore, but it was a habit. Hard to give up that extra sugar.

Well, I knew some people. I pulled some strings. And I threw a couple of people to the wolves. Nobody I liked, though. Everyone I gave to the feds was a real son of a bitch.

Christ, I’m hungry.

No gulls today. Reminds me of the signs you’d sometimes see on the pushcarts back in the neighborhood. NO TOMATOES TODAY. I walked out into the water up to my waist with the sharp knife in my hand. I stood completely still in that one place with the sun beating down on me for four hours. Twice I thought I was going to faint, but I counted backward until it passed. I didn’t see one fish. Not one.