I fucking love musicals, which is something you probably wouldn’t have guessed, because most people stereotype Vietnam veterans as non-musical-theater patrons, let alone enthusiasts. But you don’t have to be a homo to love musicals. That’s a common fallacy, because of the fact that almost every gay loves musical theater. I go to musicals with Gay Timmy and Gay Johnny all the time. We even have a subscription together at the Forrest Theatre, but that doesn’t make me gay, not even in the slightest.
Chicago is my favorite musical. I have the DVD of that one, and I watch it all the time, even though Timmy says straight men always like Chicago best. I don’t like Richard Gere’s politics because he’s a pussy liberal, and fuck the Dalai Lama for not going after China more aggressively, but I have to admit Gere is pretty good in Chicago. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger are both grade-A pieces of ass in that film, which is how you know they make musicals for non-gays too.
Anyway, I’m in the ambulance when I remembered Ella and so I asked the Puerto Rican EMT what happened to my granddaughter and he said he didn’t know because he just got me on the stretcher and put me in the vehicle. That was the extent of his job description. And I almost had another heart attack right then and there, worrying about Ella, who I thought must have been scared to death watching me convulsing on the floor. Thank God I wasn’t driving this time.
But thank God twice because—along with Sue and Hank—Ella was there at the hospital shortly after I arrived, which made me happy because it meant my granddaughter was okay, but sad because my seizure had fucked up Sue and Hank’s second date. No one falls in love at a goddamn hospital, that’s for sure.
We had to wait a long time for a room to open up, and then even longer for the bullshit tests because hospitals are run even more inefficiently than the Obama White House. I also had to stay overnight because the doctors who needed to read the test results were on some faraway mountain skiing. They had all made so much fucking dough off my brain surgery, super rich people don’t work on Sundays, and there’s always fresh powder in the world somewhere.
They all came back in on Monday with huge grins on their thieving faces and fantastic tans—white masks where their ski goggles had been—to read my test results and determine I needed an adjustment in my meds, which they themselves had originally prescribed, by the way, but do you think they apologized for giving me a combination of pills that made me feel like I was taking a ride in the electric chair? Hell no. The yahoos just gave me a different combination of pills and told me to trust them, which I had to do, because the alternative was death, or so they said. And I pay for my own health care too, so this is the best available in the land of the free. I’d have been dead long ago if I were relying on the fucking VA hospitals.
The next day Ella was in school and Sue was at work, so it was just me and my boy. Because he doesn’t know shit about medicine or how powerful men operate, Hank kissed all of the doctors’ asses unabashedly. It was pitiful. Powerful men never respect the ass kissers, they only respect power, but my son had somehow made a good living smooching the sphincters of rich people, so he wasn’t about to listen to his old man when it came to dealing with arrogant skiers who sometimes practiced medicine whenever the snow melted or they got tired of the slopes. I knew Hank had written off my opinions long ago, and so I saved my breath.
And then, finally, my pitiful trip to the rob-you-while-you-are-sick hospital was over, and Hank and I were driving back to his home. I asked to stop at my own house, thinking I’d like to pick up some more weapons, but my request was denied.
“Thought we were going to lose you there,” Hank said as he drove his tree-saving plug-in car made by little rice-eating men in some godforsaken faraway land.
“Only the good die young,” I told him. “Can’t get rid of me that easily.”
I said I was sorry to have ruined his second date, which made him laugh for some reason.
Then Hank said, “Did you check your ankle holster lately?”
I had completely forgotten that I was packing heat at the art museum. I reached down for my ankle and felt nothing. “Where the fuck’s my Glock?”
He told me that Sue had taken it home for me, and I wouldn’t be needing it anymore. And then he went on and on about how he didn’t want any guns in his house. Not around Ella. “None!” he kept saying. My son was apparently letting the first offense slide “on account of” and “only because of” my brain surgery. However, I would get “no more strikes.” Then he said, “Are we on the same page here?”
“Sue took my gun?” I said, because at least she was trained by her father on how to handle firearms. I had tried to train Hank, but he flat-out refused to fire a weapon, even when he was a boy.
A month before Jessica died, she dumped all of my guns and ammo into a bathtub full of water in an attempt to destroy my entire collection. I wish to God I could take back the things I said when I found out what she had done. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this right now, but my screaming at Jessica in the bathroom is one of the worst memories I have, including the horror show year I spent in Vietnam. I was a fucking monster that night. I didn’t hit her, but I smashed the mirror with my bare fists, bloodying my knuckles, which upset my wife even more. Jessica shouldn’t have done what she did, but she wasn’t in her right mind, and I loved her too much to face that truth. I didn’t want the doctors to lock her away in some insane asylum, and so I tried to do my best, which wasn’t good enough, obviously.
While he drove us home from the hospital, Hank kept saying, “No guns in my home. Are we clear on this issue?”
When I didn’t answer, he went on and on about all sorts of bullshit handgun statistics made up by liberals who had never even touched a gun, let alone taken care of one. Then my boy actually made a legitimate point about how someone could have taken my gun off me while I was having a seizure, before Sue got to it first. Sue knew that I always carried, so she was able to discreetly remove the Glock from my ankle holster before the Puerto Rican EMT took me away. There were many people at the art museum that day, and on any other different day bad luck could have definitely sent a more violent type as an EMT, someone who needed a gun to do some base awful thing, and then what would have happened when impulse met opportunity? It was true that any old bad guy could have used my gun against me when I was convulsing, or worse yet they could have used it on Ella. The thought made me shiver.