de puta madre

I sat in the medical center's parking lot, looking at the little machine that might open the gate if I put money in it.  Not credit cards.  Real money, the green stuff, something that I haven't held in my hands for quite a while now.  I backed up, waving some a-hole in a giant SUV to go ahead of me.  I had to think.

I raced home.  Lola's dog walker had an issue and I knew she had been in her crate a really long time.  I pushed the petal down on my hooptie, frantic.

I don't really want to give you real numbers about my personal finances.  It's just kind of embarrassing and seems inappropriate.  Let's just say when my insurance went up eight dollars per paycheck at the beginning of the year, I felt it.  Today, when I saw sixteen dollars more per paycheck gone, because of the 2% payroll tax increase, I sort of freaked out.  That's almost fifty dollars a month.  That is really a lot for me right now.

I entered the house and ran back to our room.  Lola's bed was torn to pieces and she was sitting in pee.  I was horrified.  Lola has never pissed her bed.  She couldn't hold it, and then destroyed the area.  She smelled like pee.  Everything smelled like pee.  She would need a new bed.  Motherfuckers.  My poor dog.  

I could go inside and look for an ATM.  But even if there was one, I knew I didn't have twenty dollars in my account and that I would overdraw it, costing me more money.  I drove around the parking lot.  I had thought that I had seen a gate that looked totally moveable near one end.  I drove toward it, clandestinely.  The gate had a big chain around it.  FUCK.  Hijo de la pinche gran puta. 

I walked from one class to the next, in these odd shoes that I thought might help my formerly sore and broken foot.  I felt the sole slip off and start flapping, loose.  MOTHERFUCKER.

The next day, I received a text from Lola's dog walker that she was ill.  Everyone is.  She wanted to know if she should get someone else to walk Lola.  YES, I texted back.  I knew I couldn't get back, I was at work.  I tried to check in later.  My phone battery was dead. I entered the house, hopeful.  It smelled like dog shit.  Alec walked up from outside with Lola.
"She was sitting in her crate all day with shit!  No one came!"
My poor dog, sitting in a cage next to SHIT all day.  A la fucking chingada. MOTHERFUCKER!

I looked at the low curb of the parking lot.  My '97 Mazda has driven from Atlanta to Tijuana, both ways.  It has been from Tijuana to Los Cabos, both ways.  It has done insanely secret, off road things in the Arizona desert.  It dodged every sinkhole in Tijuana, or muscled right through it.  I drove over the curb, through the grass and between the trees, turned my signal on and carefully pulled into traffic. It was liberating.

Suck your four dollars that I didn't have anyway. 

More Fun in the New Year

"Spider Pig!  Spider Pig!  Does whatever a Spider Pig does....".
The doctor abruptly stopped looking at my gnarled finger and answered his cell phone, bringing his interesting ringtone to a halt.

I looked at my hand.  They had unwrapped and un-splinted it, allowing me to see the effects of the surgery in their full glory.  It looked like a shriveled mummy hand, dry and orange-ish with marks all over its skin from the cast.  My pinky finger was covered with black bruises and the big star, my broken ring finger, still shifted unnaturally to the right.  It was hugely swollen and two large wires stuck out of it right below the knuckle.  I couldn't move either finger.

Alec's mom and sister came to visit us for a few days.  On their last evening here, they treated us to an expensive dinner in Buckhead, Atlanta's version of uptown.  As we were being seated, I heard a really loud burp from the table next to ours.  I was kind of shocked, this wasn't just any burp, it was like a frat boy challenge. I felt like I was about to start laughing and tried to keep my eyes from the source:  an older man that was sitting with a female companion.  Both seemed completely nonplussed.

The doctor returned, without explanation. 
"Hmm, it has rotated," he said, refering to the odd angle of my finger.  The 'Peanuts" theme music started roaring from his phone this time.
"Is that your ringtone?!" I asked, loudly.  He looked at me without smiling and walked out of the room, while answering his phone again.
I examined my hand some more and thought of the five hundred dollar bill the doctor had submitted to my insurance company for my first office visit.  I began to wonder if this little man could answer his phone on his own time.
He returned again, without explanation.
"Well, what I'm going to do," he said, grabbing my broken finger, wires and all,
"is push it this way," he continued, shoving my finger into a straighter position,
"and tape it to this!" he finished, splinting and taping my broken finger to my pinky.
Electric waves of pain shot through my hand and arm while he completed his project.
"You have a low pain threshold" he stated critically, while re-wrapping my mummy hand.
"You have an ugly phone and a stupid ringtone" I thought back.
"You are very anxious about this hand" he stated in the same disparaging tone, after informing me that I was losing mobility in all of the fingers on my left hand and would need to do exercises in order to avoid having a permanent claw for a hand.  

The food was delicious.  As I took the second bite of my salad, I heard another cacophonous burp. Alec's sister and I locked eyes.  Who the fuck does that?  He let out another, mini-burp that would be extraordinary for a normal person.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
"Oh my God," Alec's sister said lowly, "if he doesn't stop, I don't know, I might have to say something to the waiter!". 

I raced back to school to teach my next class.  My hand was throbbing.  I didn't know it then, but it was only going to get worse.

"I hate to say it, Ms. Wagner, but I think you're going to end up with a mangled hand" Deandre stated solemnly, shaking her head back and forth, after her class asked me about my afternoon's events. 
"That man's crazy". 

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

"They never did nothin'," the man muttered over and over again, "the children, those poor children".
I looked up at him as he wheeled me on a gurney through the hospital to the operating room.
He stared off for a minute while he rolled me into the elevator.  I thought maybe he wouldn't talk anymore, or talk about something else.
"Those children, how?  How?" he began again.
"Yeah..." I said tepidly.  It was unspeakable, but I had no idea how to convey that and every attempt I made sounded inadequate, or almost fake.  It was like when you find out from your boss that another employee was caught stealing and you feel like everything you say is a lie, even though you know you didn't do anything.  

The I.V. in my hand was throbbing, swelling and bruised.  It had been there for hours and was more uncomfortable than the hand they were about to operate on.   My ass was sticking out of the back of the gown and nakedly sitting on the gurney sheets, not matter how many times I tried to arrange things.  I still don't know why hand surgery required underwear, off.

"You know, there are those 47%ers that live off the rest of us, on ENTITLEMENTS" the nurse stated, shortly after telling me that she had herpes.  I was guessing that she didn't even know what 'entitlement' meant.  I smiled weakly.  I wasn't getting into this with her.  I just wished she would realize that it was inappropriate.  Actually, more inappropriate than talking about downstairs herpes, as far as I was concerned.  She brought it up a few more times throughout my six hour wait for surgery.  I continued to smile weakly and think of all the 'entitlements' she was probably taking advantage of: Old Pell grants that she used to get her R.N., mortgage interest write offs, tuition deductions for kids, health care costs.  As well as the real freebies:  SOCIAL SECURITY and impending MEDICARE!  I actually liked her though.  She was a stone cold cracker that kept offering me Valium, just to 'take the edge off'.  I said "no thank you" politely, anticipating anesthesia and pain killers.

"Hey!" a number of jovial people asked me,  wearing colorful headgear.
"What's your name?  Your birthday?  What's getting operated on!?"
I impressed them with my fascinatingly correct answers until the doctor finally came and wrote 'yes' on the finger that he was going to operate on. 
"Bring her my cocktail!" chief crazy headgear wearing anesthesiologist announced.
"So, is this like a pain killer or the stuff that will put me under?" I asked, as one of the crew injected a syringe into one of the outlets on my I.V.
"You are going to laugh like crazy for a second and then you'll be out" he answered.
I felt fucked up for a minute. 'Mother's Milk' I thought, thinking of the term the cracker nurse used to describe the 'cocktail' that they would be using on me. 

I woke up in the same place that I had fallen asleep in.  An ill fitting oxygen mask hovered over my face.  A large cast and wrap covered my left hand.  My I.V. had been moved and was pierced into the outside of my forearm.  I realized I was sporting a very off the shoulder look with my gown, the neck had been spread out and wires were attached to sticky things.  Someone pulled them off and helped me not be so, er, naked, and rolled me back to the cracker nurse. 

My mom was waiting for me, having sat with me all day without biting her tongue off, trying not to go at Romney nurse.  I found out that an hour and a half had passed.  It was dark outside.  The nurse reminded us that we could leave when we wanted.  I could hardly stand and stumbled into my clothes.  I was actually relieved when they brought a wheel chair to take me outside. 

I sat in the bathtub the next morning, trying to get ready for work.  Hideous bruises lined my I.V. arm, dark, black and yellow ones.  My surgery arm was bathed in a strange orange substance that wouldn't wash off.  Skin was missing where some sort of tape had been removed.  I splashed water on myself. Under my surgery arm, some weird electroprobe thing remained.  I ripped it off and threw it on the floor.  Along with the tape and cotton that covered yet another black I.V. bruise. 

Then, I went to work. 

The Grady's

"When are you going to get your cast off?" one of my students asked.
"It seems like its been on forever".
You're telling me.  Large, clunky, difficult to maneuver.  Beautiful weather wasted by mandatory sitting on ass for seven weeks.  Watching my dog whimper and stare through the window.  I whimper too sometimes.  But just a little.

"She can tell mommy's off her game!" the dog trainer said enthusiastically, pointing at my cast.
"Why are her eyes turning so red?" I asked, trying to calm Lola.
"She's just wound up, she's choking herself!"
I looked at Lola, tethered by her leash in a corner while the other dogs went through their training.  I started crying. 
We slept close that night and many nights after, Lola's neck stretched across mine while I hugged her in my sleep.

"Can you explain the difference between preparing an ordinary, American new teacher as opposed to an international teacher to understand your school?"  I asked again.
"Well, we have New Teacher Orientation" the interviewee responded.
Click.  That was all I could think.  Click.  Your Fulbright adventure has now come to an end.

My doctor grabbed the outside of my purse, dramatically.  
"Is my phone vibrating?" I asked, alarmed.
"Where's your other shoe?" he asked, smiling.
"Are you kidding?" I asked, incredulous.
I was thrilled.

He wasn't kidding.  I went home and put on my other hiking boot, the mandated stiff bottom foot wear.  I was really excited.  Until I realized I can still barely walk and that my left knee is hurting from carrying my right leg along.  And my broken foot again turned purple and bruised.

I had a great, short walk with Lola and fun training and playing with her while she was tethered in the yard.  Her eyes were NOT turning red. After,  I took a couple of days off from walking because of the pain in my foot.

I decided today that I was being a lazy fuck and that I needed to quit making Alec walk my love dog.  The walk wasn't going as great as the other that I had bragged about.  She was pulling hard and not responding to any of the stuff we had been working on in our training.  I was juggling her treat bag and transferred her leash onto a few of my left hand fingers while I tried to rearrange the bag on my shoulder.  Suddenly, Lola jumped a couple of feet in the air and ran toward a rampaging squirrel.  I held tight and pulled, even though I had heard a snap.  I got her onto the sidewalk.  I knew something was wrong and I looked at my awkwardly positioned ring finger that wouldn't move and was hanging at about eleven o'clock to the left.

I got Lola home, actually trying to act natural when kids and parents commented on my cute dog.  I put her directly in the crate and drove to my sister's.  I had broken out in a cold sweat and was crying and trying not to vomit.  They took me to Grady.

Grady is a very large hospital about two miles from my house in downtown Atlanta.  It is the only place indigent people can go here.  I've visited only a few people there and have always been scared of it.   But, I was more afraid of my dangling finger.

We had to pass through a metal detector and an airport manual wand to get in. They handed me something to put on my shirt that I stuck on.  Only later did I realize the date was written on the sticky.  I guess if they found me in some corner a few days later they would know that I was ripe. 

I got X-rayed.  I was surprised everything was happening so fast.  Every time that I have ever been to the emergency room I sat there for hours.  All of the doctors looked younger than I am, which was weird.   They put me in a plush ass room with a TV and started telling me what they were going to do. It was broken, below the knuckle.  They were going to manually re-align the bones, basically grab my finger and push the broken bones back where they should be. I started sweating again.  They told me they wouldn't hurt me and started talking about an IV painkiller drip. 

Then, timed stalled.  I saw people wheeled into the trauma unit.  They had neck braces on.  I heard them screaming from the rooms.  I waited a while.  Hours.  I understood.  But I was getting more afraid.

A young intern put shots in my hand and joked about how sweaty it was.

And then, I turned my head away and squeezed my eyes shut as he moved and shoved the bones of my finger back into place.

Fuck White People

It had been a rough couple of weeks.  Poor Lola looked butchered, violent looking staples running up her belly, the incision stained by iodine.  She couldn't run outside or play with other dogs.  My foot was broken anyway and I couldn't run outside or play with other dogs either.   Lola recovered quicker than I did, staring wistfully out the window before getting excited and pounding forcefully on the glass with her front paw-hands.  She would whimper.  It was horrible.

I took her to the vet right at the two week mark to get the staples removed.  Two 200 pound plus vet techs were assigned to my dog.  I was in there too.  At first, they tried to stand her up, holding her under her arms while the other came at her staples with some awful plier looking things.  Instead of barking and biting at the techs as any dog would do in that situation, especially a sixty-five pound, eight month old Pit Bull, Lola's ass started wagging back and forth, tail whipping as she stretched up and licked the tech's face that held her under her arms.  Eventually, she wrestled the other tech with the pliers to the ground as I tried to hold her still.  While the three of us laid sprawled on the floor, Lola pinning one of the techs to the ground and licking him, starting at the chin and over his bald scalp, butt and tail swinging wildly from side to side,  I suddenly imagined a bird's eye view of the situation and started laughing.   

Lola was free and ship shape again.  I was two weeks in to the four weeks I had to wear a cast before getting my foot X-raid again. 

I had taken her out to pee, just days before robbed uteri and broken feet had attacked us.  An Atlanta Public Schools bus drove by, kids hanging from the windows.  Probably middle school, I guessed.  Two little girls pointed at Lola.
"Look at that dog...." one breathed.
"It's cute...."
I smiled at them.
"FUCK WHITE PEOPLE!" a boy interjected, shoving his head through the window of the admiring girls.

"I wanted to contact you because I am concerned with Paul's performance in Spanish." I began, typing my usual introduction to a parent whose kid acts like a shitbag.
"He consistently has his head down and I have to ask him repeatedly to take his headphones off.  He is only passing the class by a point." I continued.
The parent's emailed resonse came almost imediately.
"We need to meet" it stated forcefully.
Great, I thought.  I knew who was going to be in trouble, and it wasn't Paul.  

I had been given three more weeks in the cast.  I was disappointed.  I had been totally counting on four weeks and then moving to an ugly shoe.  But no.

"Should I be like, sitting down whenever I can?" I asked my doctor.
"Well, yeah...," he replied, thinking, "don't you at school?".
"No, I mean, I float between three classrooms.  I move with the kids, I have to go up and down stairs....".
"YES" he responded.
"After all of that, you need to sit down the rest of the day".
Fuck me.  And fuck my a-hole school.

I checked my email.  I had suggested a time to Paul's mom and again, received an immediate response:

Wednesday at 4 pm will be fine.

Paul knows that I am not

playing with his education.

Thanks

Lila

I felt a smile spreading across my face. She might be a little different than I expected.

I walked through my neighbor's house, headed straight for the bird room.  The giant birds that had been friendly the night before were acting strangely.  Actually, they scared me.  As I replenished their water and gave them kibble and nuts, I felt them biting my clothes.  One attacked my hair.  Two of them shrunk down and ran toward me, big-ass beaks wide open.  I tried talking to them.  These fucking things normally can talk back.  They didn't.  I gave them their food and ran out.  

"Hi, I'm Hadley!" the chipper, cute girl on my porch stated in introduction.  I had already introduced myself in the same manner, shaking her hand.
She wore short jogging shorts, showing off her muscled, spray tanned legs, though it was chilly outside.  She had on a long-sleeved running jacket, her face completely made up and hair in a high ponytail.    She was petite, yet buff and strong.
"I just moved here from California!" she stated, hugging and kissing Lola.
"I work with the athletic dogs!".

Perfect.  She would look great next to Lola, tearing through the park until my foot heals. 

Lola's my princess.  She deserves only the best. 

Elecciones

"I'll be back in ONE minute." I said, clutching Lola's face in my hands and kissing her on the side of her mouth-snout.

I ran into the beer store.  The homeless Rasta man was there again, but this time, he had a friend.  Something was up.  The friend was screaming at my brown-friend guy that works the store, waving the daily shit-ass Atlanta newspaper in his face.

"You vote Romney, right?!" he yelled, waving the 'Obama Wins' cover story in his face.
I went and got my beer and cautiously returned to the line.  The original Rasta man clubbed me forecefully on the shoulder, moving me ahead of him.
"Mama, you can go ahead."
"Thanks."
"Did you see what he did?" Rasta asked me.
"I didn't see anything." I said, averting my eyes.  
"You vote India!" his friend screamed, waving the Obama page in his face.
"I'm South African!" Rasta-junior continued.
"I'm gonna come back here and shoot you!  Keep callin' those police!".
"Um, you're up," I told Rasta, "you've been here longer than me."
"Shut yo' mouth" Rasta instructed Rasta-junior.  

I paid for my beer, widening my eyes at the other brown-man friend I know that works behind the plexiglass.

I pulled my phone out as soon as I got in the car.  Lola was crawling on me.  I hid the phone beneath her, worried that the Rastas would see that I helped my brown men by re-calling the police.  I felt like I should have spoken up to them, to the Rastas.  These poor Indian/Paki/Middle Eastern whatever ass brown dudes were not their enemy.  But I am a cowardly female.  I just bought my beer.

I saw the police pulling up as I hid my phone under Lola.  I watched.  I wanted to tell the cop that Rasta Jr. had mentioned shooting my brown bro.  The Rastas charged the cop, my brown bro following quickly behind.  The cop shooed the Rastas away, just go away silly homeless fucks.  My brown-bro was exasperated, pleading with the cop. 
'Ridiculous,' I could imagine him saying, 'you don't know what just happened here.  They were screaming at me.  They threatened to kill me.  It's not right....'.

I took a right out of the gas station and drove home.  Lola crawled all over me, licking my face, jumping on my lap.

Though I didn't deserve it.  

All Saints

I looked at my increasingly hostile, first period class.  The pale, visibly shaking girl was actually at school that day.  Despite her heavy load of medication, her dark eyes continued to glare at me while her body palpitated.  Her friend had made it for her one day of attendance a week as well.  They were usually together. 

"We'll quit talking and pay attention," the friend implored, "just don't make me sit somewhere with people behind me.  It makes me very uncomfortable." 

The athlete that had been expelled last year for robbing half of the student body entered the room well after the bell had rung, calling to other students and cackling jovially with his friends.  He stood laughing and talking with no intention of sitting down.  When I told him to get a late pass, he got in my face, then threw the pass on the floor in front of me. 

My OCD brat balanced with his stomach on the seat of a chair, arms on the ground and legs extended into the air.

 A third pale girl that sat with the shakers turned her head.  I saw that she was crying again. 

"Don't LOOK at me!" she said abruptly and left the classroom. 

I asked the smart girl to change seats so that she would quit talking.  She stood up defiantly, hitting me in the shoulder with her shoulder as she walked past me... the way guys do when they want to fight. 

"Did you see that!!!!" the athlete screamed, laughing loudly.

My Ethiopian special ed. kid balanced on the back legs of his chair, sans pencil, paper or any other type of provision.  He hadn't put pen to paper in weeks.  I was getting a lot of pressure over his failing grade.  The parapro assigned to him sat off to the side, engrossed in his Kindle.  He glanced up at the board for a second.

"I think you spelled 'roto' wrong." he informed me.  I hadn't.  He went back to reading. 

No, I do not work in an insane asylum.  Just an ordinary high school.

"My dog Gus is dead."

The text startled me.  I was riding in Alec's car, on the way to a going away party.  It was from my ten year old dog whisperer, Warren.  I hadn't received a text from him in about six weeks.

I sat on my sister's front steps, handing out candy when I spotted Emily.  She was wearing a puffy muscled Batman suit without a mask, her head poking out curiously. 
"Emily, it's me, I used to be your Spanish teacher." I said, fearful that shouldn't recognize me in costume or worse, remember me at all.
"Welcome back!"  she loudly and clearly.

I grabbed her and hugged her, not ever wanting to let go.