Falling Down

I ask mom to send me Oxycontins through the mail when I get my nose done. I’m afraid to ask the doctors for too much pain meds. Afraid they’ll think I am some sort of addict. But I really hate pain. I am a total wimp about it.

For a month now, all I can think about is that crazy doc in his sterile lab coats. I think he has a big mustache like a push broom, all stiff and wiry and brown. I pray he’ll cover it with one of those white paper masks so I can’t see it. I’m afraid it will have crumbs on it from a muffin or something. I can see it all now: First, a fat nurse will pump in anesthesia through my right arm, the one with the biggest vein. Then the mustached doc will crack my nose. I hear I’ll get black eyes and finger marks on my face from his latex gloved hands pressing into my jaw. Then, he’ll pack my nose with gauze for a week so their handiwork won’t collapse. I don’t want to look like Michael Jackson.

I’m gonna call them before the surgery and act real scared. We’ll I don’t need to act, cuz I am. I want to talk to them about pain management. Might as well get the best drugs I can, right? When I broke my foot doing a cartwheel in high heels near the Target Center this summer, I went in to the clinic and stood my ground.

“Let’s discuss pain management,” I said in a cool, collected voice. My hands didn’t shake even though my heart pounded. It didn’t pound nearly as much as my foot with the streaky olive green and purple bruises that pushed greedily towards my toes. It looked like raw steak, really. I learned that cartwheels in high heels aren’t a good idea, and that bruises take on a life of their own. And that general practitioners give out stronger pain meds than specialists. Specialists are fucking judgmental and controlling, doling out enough Percocet for the weekend like the gatekeeper or something.

“So, I have to have this nose surgery. I need some pain pills,” I tell my mom. I’m fishing a little, dropping my line with confidence and control.

“As long as they’re doing your nose, tell ‘em to make it cute,” she laughs.

“Well, it’s gonna suck. I hear it’s horrible as an adult. I’ll be laid up for a week or more and they won’t give me anything. I’m sure of it.”

She babbles on about her new friend, a claustrophobic guy who hoards magazines and licks the bottom of cardboard Chinese boxes clean. He doesn’t want to waste anything. She dated him thirty years ago before his motorcycle accident. She says he was strange even before his skull smashed onto the pavement, before his brain swelled up like a silver dirigible, before the docs wrapped his head in white cotton.

She keeps on, chatting quickly like a racecar heading for a new record down a smooth strip of a racetrack. Her frantic rhythm lulls me, makes me start thinking about the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme. There’s a part where Jack fixes his head with vinegar and paper. Boy, he was stupid to fall down a hill in the first place. He deserves a broken head. So does my mom’s friend.

“I gotta go, mom. I’ll talk to you later,” I say, sleepy from the rhythm of her pressured speech, and the rhyming last words I recite in my head as Jack tumbles down from the well.

“Three. I’ll send you three,” she says with a matter of fact tone.

“Promise? Don’t forget,” I say, somewhat excited.

She assures me that she won’t. But she’s forgotten my own birthday before despite the fact she bitches about how awful it was the day I was born. Maybe they’ll get here before the surgery, like a belated birthday present wrapped up in pink tissue paper. Maybe I’ll take them right away, just in case. Just to calm my nerves.