I was dealing
craps at the Mint one afternoon when my stomach started burning. My first
thought was that I shouldn't have eaten that third bowl of clam chowder
in the help's hall. Then my head started aching. That's it, I knew what
it was. I had the flu! It was going around like the plague, anyway, and
now I had it, dammit. Well, what did I expect? Every deadbeat west of
the Mississippi was in my face eight hours a day, 16 hours on weekends,
exposing me to every disease known to mankind. It's a wonder all I had
was the flu. It could've been leprosy, or polio, or lockjaw.
Meanwhile, I was
getting worse by the second. My mouth was dry, I was having trouble
swallowing, and the world was fading in and out of focus. I turned to
the boxman. "Take me out, will yuh? I'm sick."
By the time I made
it to my apartment I was on the verge of unconsciousness. I peeled off
my shirt, fell on the couch, and dragged the phone over. I finally got
my girlfriend Christine on the line. "You gotta get over here and
take me to the hospital," I whispered. "I'm burning up. I
think I'm dying."
"Oh my God!
I'll be right there!"
I dropped the phone,
heard it clatter when it hit the floor, and then everything went black.
A hand was shaking
me, and a man's face swam into view. "Hey, are you okay?"
he said.
"Vic?"
"It's Tim.
Are you okay?"
"No . . . I'm
dying."
He helped me dress,
got me down the stairs and into the car. Then I was in the emergency
room, where a team of people, all wearing masks, ripped my shirt open
and started probing and prodding me from top to bottom, and I do mean
bottom. All I could think of was my shirt, my poor shirt. It was my
good luck shirt, the one with the little yellow stars all over it. Little
yellow . . . little . . . yellow . . .
When I came to,
I was in a white room under a white sheet. There were tubes in my nose,
tubes in my arms, tubes coming out from under the sheet. But the pain
was gone, and that's all I cared about.
The doctor came
in about an hour later and told me what happened. My appendix ruptured,
they weren't sure when, but when they opened me up it had already burst,
and I was lucky to be alive, he said. It could've turned into peritonitis,
which is what killed Rudolph Valentino, but they'd got it just in time,
and I was going to be fine, he said.
And what the hell
happened to Christine? You won't believe this, but when my roommate
Tim found me half-dead on the couch she was still at home doing her
hair! Here I was at death's door, and she had to make sure her hair
was done before she even took me to the frigging hospital. What an air
head. I never wanted to see her again, even if I lived until Sunday.
And I never thought
I would say anything bad about food, not after almost starving to death
when I first got to Vegas. But hospital food was about the worst thing
I'd ever tried to eat in my life. I thought sauerkraut was bad. My aunt
fixed that for supper one time when I was a kid, and I almost upchucked
right on the dining room table. It was like trying to drink pickle juice.
In the hospital, everything tasted like pickle juice.
The nurse would
bring in a tray, the plate covered with a little metal lid, and now
I knew why. They didn't want visitors to see what the hell we were being
forced to eat. I'd just wave my hand at the nurse and say, "Take
it away."
Tim would stop by
every night on his way home from 3-M. I always meant to ask him what
3-M was, but to this day I still don't know. Anyway, he'd stop by and
we'd talk about things. Then when it got quiet, when all the nurses
were through making their rounds, I'd get up, get dressed, and we'd
drive over to Don the Beachcomber's at the Sahara Hotel. Back in the
late sixties, this was about the best Polynesian restaurant around,
and my favorite dish was Peking Duck. God, I could eat that stuff 365
days a year.
Can't you just picture
it? Fake palm trees and fake seashells everywhere you look, and here
I am under torch lights slurping piña coladas and chowing down
on Peking Duck. Meanwhile, I'm wearing a hospital tag on my wrist and
my whole mid-section is wrapped in bandages with a tube sticking out
like a question mark. The nice thing about it was that I didn't have
to worry about leaving a big tip for the waitress. She was just glad
I didn't fall off my chair and die, not while I was in her station anyway.
Then it was back
to the hospital, where I would fast for another 24 hours, then we'd
head back to Don the Beachcomber's for another night of revelry. It's
got to be one of my top ten memories.
(To be continued)
