The Contortionist’s Handbook. Craig Clevenger
and you’re heaving blanks, a pair of fists wringing your stomach like a damp rag, trails of warm spit hanging from your mouth while you try to move your limbs but can’t. Words hit your brain like garbage churning in a breakwater, no order, no connection. Fingers. Name. Hear.
February 1987. Darvocet. And a pint of bourbon.
Yesterday, August 17, 1987. Carisoprodol. Comes in a white tablet like a big-ass vitamin, 350 mg of muscle liquefier for those tense, recovering athletes and furniture movers. Too much, and those relaxed muscles include your diaphragm, then your heart. It feels like drowning or a sumo wrestler sitting on your chest. I’d done three rails of blow to keep my heart from stopping before the paralysis set in, but they hadn’t been enough.
That’s how Rasputin found me. Molly’s cat, fourteen pounds of mottled fur, she adopted him after his collision with the passenger-side Bridgestone of a speeding pickup. Rasputin was blind and near toothless from the accident, his remaining incisor jutting out ninety degrees from his mouth. He ate soft food. He would howl and stare at you with two transparent orbs of eye gel, the flaps of dislodged retina hovering inside. I used to shut off the lights and hold him while he purred. Put a flashlight to his face and look through his dead marble eyes and see his brain. Molly got mad when I did that.
I tried to sit up, lift the weight of my ribs from my lungs, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t curl my fingers or move my lips. Couldn’t stop my tongue from sliding backward and clogging my neck. Wanted to sleep but forced myself to breeeathe, a mechanical wheeze that cut through my fog. I lay on my back, a lance of orange twilight stabbing me square in the face through a slice of curtain where the gaffer’s tape had come loose.
Rasputin yowled for attention and licked my face until his sandpaper tongue burned through my stupor. A loud purring, the noise of a slow-motion wasp in my ear. He settled onto my sternum, sandbag-heavy. The walls of my lungs touched, stayed touching.
Sounds: Door. Handbag hitting the carpet. Rasputin’s weight gone and a merciful rush of sweet, sweet air. Molly’s voice, Baby, oh God baby.
I remember my eyes being peeled open, a blurry face, plaster ceiling over the shoulder. Words, chopped and scattered into a white noise seashell blast of static, shredded phonemes landing in and out of sequence. President. Are. Much. Day. Name. The electro-paddle-blast horse kick to my chest and I’m awake beneath nylon gurney straps, breathing into a plastic muzzle and being carried down the flight of stairs outside my front door.
Best I can, I repeat the drill in my head: My name is Daniel Fletcher. I was born November 6, 1961. I had a headache and it wouldn’t stop. I had some painkillers. They weren’t working and I took too many.
Open my eyes, Where are you taking me but my words are a numbed mumble of bloated syllables and spit-foam covered with an oxygen mask. Dream-coma blur: That’s not a dark blue medic’s jacket, it’s a dark blue suit. Then there’s Jimmy’s face, right over mine. I’ve got it all wrong, must have lost some hours because they’re not taking me down a flight of stairs, they’re lowering me into the dirt. Eliminating my position, phasing me out. I’m thinking At least I’ll be asleep when they bury me, so it could be worse. But then I wonder what they’ll do with Molly, and it is worse. Too weak to panic, my eyes collapse into dark.
Here’s what happened.
LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH
Attn: Richard Carlisle, M.D., Ph.D.
Sub: Assessment Referral
August 18, 1987
Richard:
The following request for a patient assessment came late yesterday while you were still in conference. Overdose victim is a male in his mid-twenties. Queen of Angels Trauma Center personnel could not positively conclude whether OD was intentional or accidental and have requested evaluation of patient. You will find detailed history waiting for you at ER admission desk.
Q of A has scheduled a 10:00–11:00 interview today so as not to further delay discharge of patient. Patient’s history summary is enclosed; please interview and evaluate for signs of Depression/Bipolar Disorder and possible Somatoform Disorder and overall threat/risk level; cc myself and Dr. Lomax at Q of A Trauma Center.
Rgds,
W.K./p.l.
QUEEN OF ANGELS HOLLYWOOD PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL
To: Crisis Intervention Division,
LA County Department of Mental Health
From: Brian Lomax, M.D.
Director, Trauma Center
Re: Patient Assessment Referral
Date: 8/17/87
Please be advised that we are in need of a member of your staff to interview a patient currently detained as a possible suicide risk.
Summary:
Patient: Daniel John Fletcher
Chief Complaint: Barbiturate Overdose
Patient was found unresponsive at home following 911 call. Per significant other (Wheeler, Amelia) patient had been suffering from a severe migraine for several days. Had been taking unprescribed med. but did not specify (toxicology results pending).
Patient received a field saline pump followed by activated charcoal flush. Subsequently went into fibrillation; defibrillation x1 administered. Patient is currently intubated (respiratory difficulty) and stable.
Patient is chronic tobacco user, as well as showing signs of long-term amphetamine abuse. With no further history on file and no apparent cause for headache, and police background check yielding no prior criminal activity or suicide attempt, OD intent is indeterminate. Will discharge immediately, pending psychiatric recommendation.
Full medical history and LAPD background check/report is available on site. Regarding patient’s history, a) Patient identified himself by his middle name, ‘Johnny’ during delirium, though A. Wheeler insisted he goes by his first name, ‘Danny.’ b) Please review carefully details in file under ‘Extremities.’ Note that patient has a fully articulated, extra digit on his left hand (likely a ring finger, based on identical proportion to fourth metacarpus); both the hand and all the digits, including the aforementioned, appear otherwise normal.
Patient will remain overnight; intubation should be able to be removed during that time. On-site interview facility reserved tomorrow, 8/18 for 10:00 am for expedient processing of patient. Kindly provide someone to evaluate patient and submit referral summary to my attention ASAP.
-B.L./b.r.
I need coffee. The nurse said No, you’re dehydrated, handed me a carton of apple juice with a plastic cocktail straw puncturing the top. Finish this and then you need to eat. Apple juice holds a mnemonic effect for me like the smell of isopropanol holds for a child awaiting a vaccination. It rapid-fire replays my every trauma center wakeup and close call waltz with a straitjacket.
The woman in the bed next to mine looks maybe forty. Hard to tell. Two cops speak to her, writing what she says into a spiral notebook, but I can’t hear anything. She’s talking through clenched teeth, wired together to keep her jaw from falling apart. She’s pretty, with metallic hair the color of wet rock past her shoulders and parted straight, the way Mom wore hers, but this woman’s face is thinner, darker. A splint shrouds her septum, her left eye a protruding knob of mottled purple with a matching left cheekbone, a silver zipper of staples zigzags from her chin along the left side of her jawbone and a blue-black stain like an ink leak rings her throat, pronounced on the left side. Her husband must be right-handed. She pleads with the cops using