Moodswing - Broken

There’s something really wrong with the world when you can’t get a buzz off your codeine cough medicine. Christ, if that doesn’t just suck all the fun out of being sick. I’ve been chugging this stuff like shooters at a Hooters bar, and I’m still so lucid I could pilot a plane, plus I keep coughing like a late-stage lung-cancer victim. I’ve a good mind to go back to my pharmacist and accuse him of switching my prescription with pancake syrup, hoarding the good stuff for himself, because it’s not every day I get to do drugs. What rotten luck to have gotten my clutches on a legal narcotic and it doesn’t work! Now I have to find another way to fix myself.
I could call Lary. Not for drugs ... though he has drugs in his house he doesn’t even know about. Like he finally found the acid tabs he accused me of stealing more than two years ago. They were in his freezer, stuck to the underside of a pot pie or something. Thank God he found them, because I got tired of hearing him say in a condescending way, “Really, Hollis, if you took them it’s OK,” and me having to scream back, “Look, you big worthless stain on the butt end of the Earth, even back when I did drugs I didn’t do acid!”
“Goddammit, you walking
pocket of pus,” I croaked
into his cell phone, “get
your meager ass over here and fix my furnace.”
“Hi, whore,” he answered
gamely. “I’m in Colorado.”
“Huh?”
“Been here all week. You’re supposed to feed my cat, remember? How’s my cat?”
“Love ya, ‘bye!”
So Lary can’t cure me, but he can fix my broken furnace, which is why I have this bionic flu bug to begin with. I noticed it the other morning while I was poking myself in bed, wondering why I felt harder than usual — since hardness is not a quality I would attribute to myself lately — when suddenly the reason for my condition occurred to me: I was frozen. Frozen because our furnace had done a death rattle in the middle of the night, and in the ensuing hours I basically got crusted over with ice, exactly like a bleachy-haired, flannel-clad, phlegmy Snow White after she bit the bad apple and lay there preserved for eternity with woodland creatures coming from miles around to weep at her feet.
OK, not exactly like that, but I was cold. So to stay alive, Chris and I set about calling people to come and fix our broken furnace. For my part I called Lary, because when something is broken my first step is always to charm him into fixing it.
“Goddammit, you walking pocket of pus,” I croaked into his cell phone, “get your meager ass over here and fix my furnace.”
“Hi, whore,” he answered gamely. “I’m in Colorado.”
“Huh?”
“Been here all week. You’re supposed to feed my cat, remember? How’s my cat?”
“Love ya, ‘bye!”
So with Lary inconsiderately unavailable, my options fell to Daniel and Grant. Daniel was vetoed immediately because he couldn’t fix a broken furnace any more than he can perform eye surgery on himself. He’s an artist. He creates, he doesn’t mend. His own garbage disposal has been broken for over a year and he has yet to begin the highly technical process of dialing the building manager’s phone number so she can dispatch the superintendent to fix it.
So I called Grant. Grant can fix almost anything ... not with his actual own hands, mind you, but he knows guys. There’s his hardwood-floor guy, his electricity guy, his HVAC guy. What he can’t fix he leaves broken and figures it’s better for it. Like the time he found an ancient wooden pie chest on the side of the road, and I asked him if he planned to replace the rusty torn screen, and he looked at me like I just asked him to eat beetles. “Its broken-ness is what makes it so fabulous,” he gasped.
But Grant sounded sad when he answered the phone. I’d been gone and hadn’t heard the news: That day he was on his way to a funeral with his daughter to grieve the deaths of her three friends, who died together tragically over the weekend. Two of them were children. “She used to babysit those kids, Hollis,” Grant said, his voice thin. “She can’t stop crying.”
Grant’s daughter just turned 18, and it looks like adulthood didn’t waste time introducing her to the hardness of the life. “She keeps sobbing, she keeps saying, ‘But Daddy ... ‘,” Grant grieved. “God, why does it break my heart so horribly to hear her say that?”
I think I know why. It’s because the child in her is barely veiled by her new womanhood, and Grant heard his child appealing to him to make it all better, to wave a wand and make the world the way it was a few days ago, and he felt his utter powerlessness to provide her that. “God, Hollis,” Grant lamented, “I couldn’t do anything but let her cry. I couldn’t fix it.” Instead he realized a tiny piece of her will have to remain broken, and she won’t be better off for it, just wiser and stronger as we all eventually become through the course of life, and a little less dependent on her father.