I couldn’t stop crying. My wife stood in front of me and I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my head in her stomach. I told her all my fears in hopes that it would make us both feel better. I wanted to find a way through the grief, to emerge on the other side in a state of grace, knowing I was strong enough to live on regardless of what happened. But I still wasn’t certain.
And then my wife farted—a remarkably well-timed fart that made me switch from tears to laughter right away. God bless that fart. I needed that fart. I asked her to do it again and she declined.
She went out for water, and a different nurse, who turned out to be a real shithead (every hospital has its share of dud nurses), told us that we were being kicked out of the private room. No more VIP treatment for us. When my wife came back in, we both took turns calling the shithead nurse a shithead behind her back, and then we headed out to the main waiting room. The receptionist said there was a phone call for us from the OR with an update. The doctor had promised us a mid-surgery update to let us know if the bowel was viable or not—if our son was going to live or die. This was that phone call. The receptionist held out the receiver for me.
I have a chronic case of Walter Mitty syndrome. I’m the type of person that spends an unreasonable amount of time during each day imagining himself plunged into extreme circumstances. Any time I walk outside with my children, I look up to the sky to see if a giant alien ship has stationed itself above my house. Any time I go to Target, I take note of which items I could use as weapons should a zombie apocalypse strike and then the entire store becomes a stronghold for the last of the uninfected. Any time I get on an airplane, I think about crashing in the ocean and being lost at sea for years, teaching myself to fish using only the stitching of my wallet. I am constantly foiling imaginary bank robbers and sexual predators. I waste hours every day envisioning a life far more dramatic, far more macho, than the sedate circumstances in which I usually exist.
That’s part of the reason why I wanted to start a family. When you start a family, you’re signing up for drama. You’re signing up for worry. You’re signing up for life-and-death. You’re signing up for a life that means something more, even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots of Fire Water in the Giants Stadium parking lot. Kids make your life significant. They give your life a spine. On some twisted level, I was signing up for a moment such as this: to be there waiting and weeping as I clutched my fists and begged for my son to be all right. But now that it was here, now that it was so sickeningly real, I knew I wanted no part of such cinematic moments. I just wanted life to become normal again. Uneventful. Boring. I wanted to go back to the intensely aggravating march of daily existence. I wanted my son to live so that he could grow up to annoy the shit out of me. People tell you that you should never take life for granted but that’s wrong, because taking life for granted is an encouraging sign that your life is going well. I wanted that.
I took the receiver from the receptionist and braced myself.
SEVEN
YEARS
EARLIER
MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION
My wife was pregnant for the first time, and I made extra sure to spend those nine months of gestation celebrating what I presumed would be the end of my freedom. When you’re married without children, you’re essentially still a single person. You can live cheaply. You can do drugs. You’re mobile, with no goddamn kids anchoring you to one location. You can even get divorced with a minimum of fuss. If you’re married and you don’t have kids, you can drive to the beach on a whim. No living parent does that kind of thing. That’s suicide. That shit requires ten months of intense planning.
So I took full advantage of the time I had left. My wife couldn’t drink. She couldn’t have caffeine. She wasn’t allowed to have cold cuts because the bacteria on the deli slicer blade can get into the fetus and infect it with nine different strains of botulinum. She couldn’t do much of anything. On the other hand, I could do as I pleased, and I did. I drank. I smoked all the weed I had left so that there wouldn’t be any weed leftover in the house when the baby arrived because that was me being ethical. If this angered my wife, she was too busy retching into a mop bucket to show it.
Also, I bought concert tickets. Shit yeah, I bought concert tickets.
There was gonna be a big Oasis concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion, an outdoor venue located near Baltimore, forty minutes north of our house. Jet and Kasabian were the opening acts. This was back when listening to Jet was something people did. I bought two tickets because I assumed that once the baby arrived, I would be locked away from the world for two decades (NOTE: Not all the way true). I wanted to get drunk and go listen to Oasis because IS OASIS NOT THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WHOLE OF BRITAIN?
“I got these concert tickets,” I told my wife.
“Oh, really?”
“Yep. Two tickets.”
“Do you want to bring a friend?” she asked. I did.