A week or so later cops came up here and asked had I seen anyone fooling around any buildings. Also asked if I had any problems with motorcycles. The truth crossed their minds. But probably they didn’t seriously suspect me. Otherwise their questions would not have been so perfunctory.
I’m pleased I was so collected in answering cops’ questions.
21
This is how a guy never, ever wants to wake up: handcuffed, and in a hospital bed. But that was how Doc found himself. Cuffed to the bed. A doctor walked in. Not a prison medical technician’s assistant, but a real doctor. He was even wearing a white coat. The doctor leaned over him.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Can you hear me okay?”
Doc nodded.
“Do you know how you got here?”
Doc shook his head. He had no goddamned idea.
“Okay, that’s okay. Let’s start with basics. Do you know what year it is?”
“It’s—”
Doc did not know what year it was. But it dawned on him that he knew how to answer this stupid question.
“It’s the year after last year.”
The doctor frowned. “Do you know where you are?”
Doc looked around. Saw nothing but a metal cart with pills in paper cups. An armed guard sitting on a chair. The room had no windows, and there was nothing on the walls. He looked down at his body. Saw a garment that was half a garment. His hand was plastered with tape holding a needle in. Tubes ran from his hand up to a metal stand with a bag hanging from it, half full of clear liquid. A person who must have been a nurse came in and eyed the bag. Squeezed it in a way that seemed reckless, and walked out of the room. Doc’s cuffed wrists were chained to the bed’s metal rails. His ankles, too, were manacled to the bedrails. He had no clue where he was. All he knew was that his skull felt like it had been split in half by a concrete spillway. Icy water splashed through the spillway, pushing his brains apart.
“Any sense of where you are?” the doctor asked again.
“Yes. I am directly above the center of the earth.”
Hey, at least it was an answer.
The doctor smirked. “All right, funny guy. And can you tell me your name?”
“I can,” Doc said. “I know my name. I know it!”
“Congratu-fuckin-lations,” the guard called out from his chair.
“It’s Richard L. Richards. See this?” Doc glanced at his own forearm, where he had a big dollar sign tattooed and underneath it, FUCK YOU I’M RICH. It was a joke. He was Rich, Rich Richards, even if people called him Doc. He’d discovered it on the wall of a tattoo parlor in Hollywood, among the designs customers could choose. Doc didn’t have amnesia. He knew who he was. Fuck you, I’m Rich. He just got his bell rung somehow and could not remember the some or how.
He had a shackle around his waist. A stun shackle, actually. If he tried to pull away, it would zap him good and fierce.
“What did I do?” he asked the doctor. “Did I kill somebody?”
The armed guard at the door laughed long and loud. “Did I kill somebody,” he imitated in a mock-high voice.
“You sustained a traumatic brain injury,” the doctor explained. “You almost died. You’ve been in an induced coma for eight weeks now, while we waited for the swelling to go down.”
“Has this asshole been sitting there guarding me the whole time?”
“Time and a half, actually,” the asshole said.
The doctor explained to Doc that he was in a hospital in Lodi.
“Fuck, I hate Lodi.”
But had he ever been to Lodi? He wasn’t sure.
Traumatic brain injury, they kept repeating at him. The doctor gave him a pamphlet, “Educating Your Loved Ones About Your TBI.” It was what they gave out at that hospital, which did not treat convicts unless it was forced to. Doc didn’t have any loved ones, but he read it anyway. He would be sleeping a lot, his imaginary loved ones were meant to understand. He might seem to have undergone a personality transformation, and present now as more mild, or more angry, less or more prone to violent outburst, gifted in a savant-like way, or blunted and dulled in intelligence and executive functioning. Loved ones, for those who had them, should be patient about these changes, and about the recovering person’s confusions and sensitivities, his vertigo, his atypical ideas and erratic moods.
Doc did have a lot of strange thoughts over the days he lay in that bed, waiting for the nurse to come in and squeeze and change the IV bag. Mostly they were thoughts about country music stars, who roamed his mind like ponies on a circle track. These stars, men and women both, were fancy, dressed to perform for thousands onstage and many thousands more in television land. They were folks who seemed like old friends of the family, but he didn’t know what family, or whose. There was a reunion feeling crowding into his mind, many people gathering on the stage for an all-star number. Dolly Parton with her dimples. Roy Acuff. Ray Pillow. Ray Price the Cherokee Cowboy. Skeeter Davis. Ferlin Husky. Everyone in on “Wildwood Flower.”
Cut to a commercial for Martha White Flour, sung by Flatt and Scruggs.
The doctor said that brain injuries could do that. Make you see a memory clearly, or hear music, or in this case both.
Doc’s sadistic foster dad, Vic, had been fond of the Grand Ole Opry and watched the TV show. Porter Wagoner was his foster father’s favorite. Porter Wagoner wore denim jackets with cutaway tails to showcase his fry-pan-sized rodeo buckle. His face was tall and oval-shaped like the canvas opening of a covered wagon. His slack creases could have sliced ham, slacks that were too form-fitting to need any belt, much less a rodeo buckle, and the idea that a dandy like Porter Wagoner had been a winner or even a contestant in any legitimate rodeo was not realistic, but it was part of the culture.
Time pedaled past, Doc’s thoughts free-floating, giving the days and nights a seamless sameness, dazed wakefulness, a fresh IV bag, an exchange of lighthearted hostility with the guard by the door, and knockout sleeps.
One day they put him in prison clothes and shuttled him back to New Folsom, but not his former block. Doc had to go to the skilled nursing facility, because he slept twenty hours a day and had balance issues, fell over when he tried to walk.
He knew what year it was. He knew where he was. He could not remember why he hated Lodi, but maybe it wasn’t important. Fuck you, I’m Rich. The information was back, more or less, but he felt changed. Altered. Not just on account of the country music piping in through one ear, or via some other entry point, piping in and filling him with sounds and images from the past. The most extreme difference was his temperament. It was like someone had gone in there, into his head—not the biological goo packed into the skull, but the real him, the memories and feelings, the images stored up. As if someone had gone in there and mucked around, changed things, while he was in the coma. He felt different. He felt good. Even if he suffered from debilitating headaches and did not always have words when he went to say them. He had this feeling that everything was going to be okay. Which was strange, because nothing would be. He was serving a sentence of life without parole. And he was a cop, and now that well-guarded secret was out. Everyone knew, which was why his cellie had tried to kill him. Doc was greenlighted. His future would only be shitty. He would be transferred to a prison that was all protective custody. Once there, if his cover got blown, if people found out about his background, there would be no place left to transfer. It was likely Doc was going to die a violent death. And yet, he took things one hour at a time and didn’t panic. He felt a sense of peace, and it was new, a new feeling for him. Probably his edge had been blunted, just like the pamphlet for his imaginary loved ones had warned.