won my share of races for my age group, and don’t you go asking what that is. So, yeah, I put in my time on the bike. It helps me feel centered.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? All that riding. Do you ever get in crashes?”
“Not a one. Knock on wood. How did you say you found me? Not that I mind having fans. It’s important for me to set a good example. I’m just curious.”
Textbook narcissist; like a meth addict whose drug is attention and who burns through it every few seconds, then resents the need and its provider.
She’s standing in the wind, arms crossed. I stand. “May I make a confession?”
“If this is some weird stalker thing, I’m going to call the guards.” She sort of laughs.
“I’m a journalist.”
She blinks a couple of times, discomfort. “Ha. I should’ve guessed.” She looks at the prison. “This part of my life is off the record. I’ve been where these kids are, and neither I nor they need to have our stories reduced to a bunch of clever sound bites.”
“I. .”
“I don’t want to be part of some humiliating ‘where are they now’ story. They warned us on the show we could be hounded the rest of our lives.”
Yep, good suggestion: a story about where she is now. I clear my throat. “Guilty as charged. I’m following some of the recent stars to see how TV has changed them or their perspective.”
“No thanks. Ask Donovan. Rodent Nuts craves the limelight.”
“You keep up with him?”
“He’s an investment advisor. But, get this: for kids! Doesn’t that beat it? That duplicitous ape is selling himself to rich families in L.A., telling them he can help their children learn to understand Wall Street.”
“I get it. The press can be obnoxious. I’m going for something more thoughtful. It’s a look into a life most of us can only dream of living. You’ve seen what it’s like inside Hollywood. Inside the
“What did you say your name was?”
“Nat Idle.” I reach into my wallet and grab a business card. I hand it to her. She makes an appearance of studying it. On her right hand, only her index fingernail is painted, light pink. She wears Levi’s and a cotton T-shirt under her windbreaker.
“Who do you write for?”
“Various places-magazines, mostly, some online stuff. You know the drill these days. Work where you can get it.”
She looks in my backseat.
“You’ve got a new kid?”
“Yup.”
She’s thinks about a second. “I’ve got to go. But I’ll consider whether I want to do an interview. My time is pretty tight and my employer doesn’t much like press.”
“The prison cares about whether you do interviews?”
“Not them. This is pro bono.” Without elaborating, she hands me a business card. It reads:
Sandy Vello
Student
Teacher
It’s got an email address: 4ABetterWorld@gmail.com. For A Better World. It’s obnoxious and, more so, it’s not the hotmail address I received an email from before. I taste bile. Who does that belong to?
“You work for the government, as a teacher?”
“No questions. Email me and I’ll think it over.” She pauses, then says: “The timing could be interesting.”
“How’s this weekend look for you? Maybe for coffee. I’m under a bit of a deadline.”
“Email.” She walks across the small parking lot to a red BMW M3, a car lover’s roadster. Hardly a step down from her Porsche. She’s got money or a benefactor, but that’s all beside the main point: Sandy Vello is alive.
I stand there, holding her card. Where am I versus where I was five minutes ago? A name was on a piece of paper dropped in the subway by a bum or a drunk or a would-be killer, and then I read on the Internet that Sandy’s been killed in a biking accident. She-or someone on her behalf, or someone posing as her-reached out to me. Is someone playing with my head? Was the obit actually on my computer, or did I imagine reading it?
By way of getting answers, I can think of two things that need immediate inspection: the inside of my computer, and the inside of my head.
9
It’s no wonder most people think of the emergency room as the ER. The initials fit and, perhaps more powerfully, the TV show spread the popular misconception. Most physicians actually think of it as the ED-emergency department. I think of it as something altogether different: Reason Number 4 I quit medicine.
I’m sitting in the ER/ED in a yellow plastic chair waiting to get the cut in my scalp checked. I’m flashing back to my second year of med school, on rotation right here, when I learned a painful lesson that helped redirect my professional aspirations. The teddy bear is a trap.
A seventeen-year-old redhead with pale skin, attended by her mom and clutching a stuffed brown bear with deep green inset eyes, comes in wailing from hip pain. The girl says it’s been brutal since she careened off a mogul at Squaw Valley and hurtled into a tree. A surgical repair four months earlier left pins and a small metal plate securing her femur to her pelvis. She’s run out of her opiates. She says the surgeon is located in Marin and not available to see her for a few days to refill her prescription.
The emergency-room doctor overseeing my rotation calls me aside and tells me we’re witnessing classic behavior of an addict. As evidence, she points to 1) the teddy bear; and 2) the mother’s arms.
The doc tells me that when someone over the age of about twelve carries a teddy bear, it’s an unusually accurate sign of an attention-getting effort, or an emotional problem, or a prop. She also instructs me that if I study the mom, I’ll find the thin skin, scarecrow teeth and, she speculates, the tracked arms of a heavy drug user. The doc says the girl is either sharing opiates with the mom or fronting for her.
The doc turns down the drug request and gives the girl a strong dose of over-the-counter pain-killers.
I excuse myself and I stealthily follow mother and daughter to the parking lot. They have a terrible shouting match. As I stand in the shadows, mom tells daughter she wasn’t acting sympathetic enough, then slaps her offspring.
I feel an arm on my shoulder. It’s the attending doctor. She gently admonishes me for invading patient privacy, inviting a lawsuit, not trusting an attending physician, and wasting time.
She explains the emergency-room ethos: We stop the bleeding. She asks me what I’d have recommended we do with the mother-and-daughter drug seekers. I don’t have a good answer.
I hate the ED. It’s the coldest place on Earth, the reductio ad absurdum of a medical profession, populated by generally well-meaning but worn-out doctors who in the name of expediency make tough calls, one after the next. It’s the extreme version of why I left medicine, which I took to be too black-and-white, and so instead embraced the grainy and blurry world of journalism, where black is one side of the story and white is the other. I don’t make the tough decisions anymore; instead, I comfort myself, fairly or not, that I give other people the information to decide.
Now, I’m waiting in the exact same ED for my head to be checked, two seats down from an obese woman holding her stomach, rocking back and forth, and mumbling. My money is on fast-food poisoning. Across the room, a large man in his early twenties watches the ABC
Sizing up my fellow patrons distracts me from my dislike of this place and of hospitals, which has only grown
