Bloody Monday
Monday, July 28th, 2008
After I pumped my fist a few times, she slipped the needle in, cold and clean, in the tightened skin on the inside of elbow. The nurse had massaged that place for a few seconds, maybe 20, to get the vein to surface, and when it did, it was round and long, deep blue, like underground electrical wiring.
“Just squeeze that every five seconds.”
That was my only direction before she attached the empty collection underneath the thin metal hospital bed and walked away. She had affixed the needle to my arm with a large, scare bandage that was see through and its that were fastened with little ripples to my skins were already beige with fresh blood.
The room smelled like iodine and my arm had, which had bee temporarily swabbed, was now the same color as an island boy’s. I never looked back again after glancing the bloody bandage. I kept my attention on the heart-shaped ball she gave me to squeeze and tried to forget the thousand little pin pricks I imagined that went off in tiny piches in a wave around the circumference of the initial prick.
I could see out the window bay into the grayness of late morning – one last rainy July day that, together with the river, would lead to a steam bath that would weight the whole world down the next day and make it hard to breathe. Fat rain drops slipped down the windows. I could see the tops of flag poles that stand at the main entrance of the office complex.
I never got light headed the way I expected to slip off into some fantasy realm where there angels tugging at my close and my head was reeling – spinning – when I was drugged out in the dentist’s chair when I was eight and imagined myself turning at the same pace as though I was attached to the drill, but I never let go into the etheral plain. I was in business mode, uptight, present, worried that I would stumble and fall headfirst into the corner of a table once my feet hit the ground after filling the bag.
Pump, pump, pump goes my hand, squirting the blood against the bag’s length. Fresh blood, right from the vein, and when I think about I feel that tiny pinch buried in my elbow and and somehow can feel it in my toes.
Why is that my mind turns to the recrwational drug user, the ones who mainline H for pleasure, junkies that melt down in sppons first like breakfast over a candle flame or maybe a lighter or beaker, a science experiment, and tied the long rubber band around their arm to call out their vein, use the rubber to pull it tight? Why do I see the crackheads withsunken eyes and gray circles – eyes hollowed out into their faces, dead and alive, DAA, unhealthy and why do they use the same needle as I do – and why does the nurse forget to clean it?
On the outside, though, I’m healthy and charging thoprough it. Pump, pump, pump, squeezing all my insides out, my iron, and if they’d forget me, I’d slip quietly, dizzily to sleep and it would be all over and done, for good, myself a junky but only addicted to that pinch.
The burn intensifies and my arm, that lies on an aluminum tray, goes numb, is tapped out. I can’t feel the needle, just the squeeze that has me pinned down. Sadistic nurses inb sweet caps, white pants and lab coats with regular blouses underneath, undo me, taken all my blood, and the bponce-empty bag now swolen and round like a heart is set on my lap, a red saddle bag as red as Hawaiian Punch.
