L.A. Fisher - Listen

Chapter 17



I couldn’t open my mouth; couldn’t speak for myself.  The whole story would have gone much differently had I been able to tell my side of it.  As it was, Kendra spoke for me.  She was my lips while I was perfectly formed ears.  I just lied there hearing the story as it unfolded.

According to her, Marcus had leased the multi-million dollar car using a fake name and a fake ID.  He got the money to do this through phishing scams, illegal pornography websites, and pushing drugs.  During a moment of extreme frustration he broke into the house at the country club in search for money, drugs or whatever he could find.  He destroyed everything he could get his hands on and when I heard he was there Kendra and her brother dropped me off at the house and I went in alone to talk him into calming down.  At gunpoint he led me out of the house while Vissili called the police.  Vissili and Kendra followed as fast as they could, but Marcus quickly lost them before he crashed the car driving through a residential area.  I heroically crawled from the wreckage.  Marcus beat me half to death and I popped his testicles in self-defense.

Marcus was the perpetrator.

He robbed the house.

He crashed the car.

He had the gun.

It seemed a bit far-fetched that my brother was the mastermind of the whole thing, that he found a random house to ransack, and that he tried to kill his own brother in the middle of the ghetto, but we had more than enough eyewitnesses to put him away for life.  And because of some quick thinking on Kendra’s part, the police will never have known that Anthony Medina was ever at the house.

When I pointed the gun at Marcus’s head, Kendra was watching from the rearview mirror of the Z3.  She begrudgingly threw every last dollar back into Tony’s backpack and gave it to Vissili when he got to the car.  She made him give the money, the license, and the military ID back to Medina.  He had said, “You’re lucky we don’t take this as evidence, son.  Go ahead and go home and do your research next time.”  Simple as that, Medina would never know that he was almost scammed out of half a million dollars.  

Kendra laughed when she told me that one of the Emergency Medical Technicians found a used condom stuck to the inside of my thigh when my pants were cut from me.  She didn’t have an explanation for that one.  Everything else she had a reason for, an excuse, or a logical explanation.  I was just a guy trying to help out his brother.  Luckily, the condom wasn’t really the most bizarre element to what had happened.  In fact, everything else made it seem obsolete.

I got the whole story in between failed attempts to get me to eat baby food through a straw, and I.V. complications.  More specifically, I was too weak to get up and I couldn’t tell anyone when the I.V. drip had hydrated me to the point that I pissed myself.  They had me going in bedpans eventually, which was humiliating because Marcela didn’t always check whether or not I used it before letting my guests in.  Kendra ignored the smell of defecation and my mutilated face as she told me little bit by little bit.  She kept coming and telling me the joys and difficulties of each day.  She promised herself that I would heal, that I would get better and that we would get through this.

“Marcus still isn’t talking.”

My little brother went into silence after the incident with his manhood.  It wasn’t just that he was completely humiliated about our new sterilization technique, but Kendra made him out to be the bad guy.  The LAPD didn’t just take her word for it, they checked his apartment, and unfortunately for him, his hard drive.  When news got out of what Marcus had been into, Kendra’s story became more and more detailed.  So much so, that it would fill the pages of another book if I wrote it all.

Marcus’s newfound deformity became a joke.  I was called Lorena Bobbitt’s one-armed brother.  Marcus was mocked, harassed, and laughed at.  “What did Marcus want to eat for breakfast?” “I don’t know… what?”  “An omelet, he had to break his eggs!”

To put it in the simplest terms, if you’re a man, you are so low that people will laugh at you if your manhood is destroyed.  Magazines will publish articles about how your pissed off wife took a knife to your Johnson and chucked it out the window of a moving car.  There will be Sunday morning comics that depict you having your grapes turned into raisins.  It doesn’t matter if you were good or evil, nice or mean, attractive or ugly.  The world hates men.  Especially white men!

Let’s think about it for a second.  A person identifies himself or herself as a Black or a Hispanic or an Asian, that’s great!  A person identifies himself as a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or even an Atheist, no harm no foul.  A man identifies himself as a homosexual and the world rejoices in his bravery.  Women can identify themselves as women and they’re thought of as strong.  But when a man identifies himself as a man, he’s a bigot, he’s not in touch with his sexuality, he’s a womanizer, or he’s a thick-necked brute filled with testosterone.  Why is it that white men are the most hated of all minority groups?  They’re the world’s bull’s-eyes.  Ethnic groups call them racists, whether it is a bunch of Mexicans complaining that they should have the same legal rights as United State’s citizens or if the black community is seeking reparation for the slavery of their grandparents, white men are the enemy.  Bra-burners paint us as wife-beating oppressors, child’s welfare groups portray us as child abusers, and the government has stripped men of their power when it comes to families and the home altogether.  Men are the lowest species on the planet… publicly lose your nuts in an accident and you’ll understand what I’m getting at.

For more than a week I was stuck in the hospital bed with just my thoughts.  On occasion I would try to speak to Kendra.

My jaw!

My arm!

It hurt just to swallow.  My mouth would fill with saliva and blood… I would gulp it down.

Fight the tears.

The only thing I could effectively do was listen.  Dr. Goldman wouldn’t tell me how much damage had been done to me.  There was talk about internal bleeding.  They thought I was going to die.  It was a miracle I hadn’t died.

Listen.

Will and Caroline were still out there with my kids.  I was stuck in a hospital connected to a bunch of tubes that did my eating and drinking for me.  The bathroom was too far and I didn’t have the muscle or energy to go to it.  My nasal passages stopped working.  Blocked out my own smell.  

Listen.

I only opened my eyes when Kendra walked into the room.  The lights were too bright and when my face moved it reminded me of the repair that was still in progress.  Repeatedly ingesting my own blood was bad enough.  I was so hungry.  Food danced around my eyelids; steak dinners, grilled salmon, anything but this goddamned baby food they’d been trying to drown me in.  Bloody baby food doesn’t exactly satiate the appetite.

Listen.

Listen.

The word repeated in my head.  Was I saying it?  Was it being said to me?  I couldn’t do anything else.  It’s not like I had any other fucking options!  I was in a hospital bed with one arm, no face, and a shit ton of internal problems that I wasn’t being told about.  I didn’t know whether my heart had been punctured by a rib, my lung had taken in my xiphoid process, my duodenum disconnected my small intestines from my stomach, what?  Give me something!  I’m listening!

I choked on my own vomit and Marcela didn’t come in until the heart beat monitor started to make a funny sound; kind of like a steady dial tone.

I woke again to the taste of regurgitated applesauce, latex, and blood.  My chest hurt.  Defibrillators suck!  

Kendra came in.

“You almost died earlier.”

Again?

“I’m sure you knew that.”

It’s kind of my new thing.

“You should be able to eat in a couple of days.”

Fantastic!

“It’ll still be soft foods, but better than nothing, right.”

Shit…

“Your kids are fine as far as we can tell.”

That’s good.

“Your old friends still have them.  They’re in the same house.  Caroline was on the news… said she witnessed the whole thing.”

Stupid bitch!

“They think you’re going to die.”

They’re not the only ones.

“If you’re not better by Wednesday I’m going to have you unplugged.”

Unplugged?  I turned to see if the bastards had me hooked up to some heart bypass machine or whatever.  Nothing.  Just the drip and a monitor showing my vitals.

“Just seeing if you were listening.”

Listening?  Babe, that’s all I can do!

She kissed me on the forehead and left me…

Listening.