We got a late call that night so I didn’t have time to stop by my apartment to shower and change before meeting Carrie at her place. She generally didn’t like me showing up in my EMT uniform. I didn’t understand that because we always ended up naked on the couch anyway unless her roommate was home, which was rare because she worked the night shift. Sometimes I’d come over in the slacks and polo shirt Carrie had bought for me, and I wouldn’t have even made it to the couch and we’d have our clothes off.
On this night I had promised to pick up dinner and a video—the new Denzel. She was more interested in Denzel than getting my clothes off so I was still fully clothed when she said, “Something smells.”
“I think it’s the Mu Shu Pork,” I said. “It’s good though, let me make you one.”
“No, it’s not Mu Shu Pork. Most definitely, it’s not. It smells like dog shit. Did you step in something and not check your feet?”
I started sniffing. I still smelled the old lady we’d taken in one our last call who’d had bad diarrhea on her clothes and sheets, that I’d done my best to clean up. I thought it was just a memory smell. Sometimes you smell something bad and it just hangs in your bones all day. It’s why most EMTs who come to the job with mustaches end up shaving theirs. “I just smell Mu Shu Pork,” I said hopefully, but I knew as soon as I said, it wasn’t convincing.
“Oh, gross. Oh, get out of here. Oh, Jesus! Get right up right now. You have shit on your leg.” She jumped up, and in doing so knocked over her sweet and sour chicken, and she swore again, and looked at that mess, then looked at the brown streak I now saw on the back of my leg, and she screamed so tears were coming out of her eyes. “You brought shit into the house and you got it on the couch. Oh, gross! Get out of here. I can’t believe you. That’s so disgusting.”
I stared at my pant leg—at the brown smear on the back of my leg, some of which had already transferred onto the couch fabric.
“I can’t believe you. That is so gross. You go home. Go home right now. And don’t come back until you’ve showered and scrubbed and changed. Oh, I feel sick.”
“Can’t I clean up here? I mean, what about our dinner? What about Denzel?”
“Get out! Get out now. I’m going to puke if you stay. Oh, how am I going to clean this up?”
“I’ll do it. Just get me a paper towel.”
“Now, you’re just going to get it on everything. Where else do you have it? It is dog shit, isn’t it? It’s not human shit. Oh, it is. It’s human shit! Oh, it’s probably diseased.”
I don’t remember what else she said. I got out of there. I went home and put my pants in a plastic garbage bag and showered, and scrubbed and loaded on the aftershave, and put on the nice clothes she liked me to wear, but when I got back in my car, I was just thinking how she was just going to get all on my case again.
I was so ticked at her, I drove to Uncle Frank’s out on the West Service road. Instead of sitting at the bar, I took a seat in the couch area and ordered a beer. A dancer came over and I took a crisp twenty out of the stack I’d gotten at the bank that afternoon when I’d cashed my paycheck. I laid it on the table next to the big armchair. A lap dance only cost ten dollars, but I just looked into her eyes and said, “Double the fun… and there’s more where that came from.”
***
I cried alone in bed that night. I cried because I was pathetic, because I knew my girlfriend didn’t really care about me. I cried because my partner thought I wasn’t right. I cried because I felt puny and empty. I cried because I saw myself in the future—a pathetic old man taking cab rides into the North End to get blow jobs from crack whores.
I lay in bed listening to the phone ring. It rang a couple times, not a few minutes apart, and then it rang no more.