Blurry (2)
It had been a few days since Zero to Hero, and T.A. Giles hadn’t been back to New York. Immediately following the event he had been taken to a nearby hospital and hadn’t been released. He hadn’t seen his daughter, Jessica, in as many days, and he wasn’t certain that she would want to see him, either. He tried to justify it to himself in different explanations, but, simply: he had let her down. As a father and a friend, Giles had failed to be diplomatic; instead, he lost his temper and, in return, she lost respect for him. Enough respect, at least, for Giles to spend a few days thinking about it. A few days in the hospital felt like a few months in the outside world. Giles was isolated, mostly, except for the doctor who came in every day for an update and the nurse that checked on him every few hours. She was about 30, overworked and underpaid, with two children at home that she would have liked to tell Giles about if she had time. She didn’t, of course, but Giles knew, at least, that they shared a common interest and a common problem: children, and the fact that there wasn’t enough hours to spend as much time with them as they deserved. The only thing they didn’t share was a common solution, and Giles, sore neck and all, didn’t feel like he had it worse than her. For the nurse, it was the same. Common ground: it’s easy to find, hard to hang on to. Giles’s doctor came into the room wearing the white lab coat and holding on to a clipboard. Giles, neck rigid but not because of fear, wasn’t familiar with hospital procedure but he knew that it went something like: good news or bad news, etc. He figured that if it could get any worse than that’d be okay because he could take it; whether or not his quasi-family might was harder to say. “Well, Travis, we’ve taken a look at your x-ray from this morning and I must say, you’ve made remarkable progress.” The doctor sounded quite pleased with himself. “Great to hear, doctor.” Giles didn’t sound overly confident. “But ...” he flipped through the chart. “There’s always a ‘but,’ isn’t there?” The doctor smiled. “Usually. It’s not so bad, though. We’re going to keep you for another night. Tomorrow, I’ll have another look and by that time I think you’ll be healed enough to go.” He grabbed a white, cylinder-shaped piece of plastic. “You’ll have to wear this ridiculous thing, but that’s not so bad.” Giles shrugged. Or tried to, anyway. “I’m not exactly in the market, doc.” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not supposed to get involved in personal lives, Travis, but it says here on the chart that you’re unmarried.” Giles tried not to laugh. “You don’t have many customers that are unmarried yet still not on the market?” “Many. But not many 35-year-old men.” Giles was unfazed. “Consider me an anomaly.” “Will do. Are we done here?” Giles nodded and the doctor motioned to leave. “Wait,” piped Giles. The doctor stopped in the doorway. “Am I going to be okay getting back in the ring on Friday?” The doctor sighed and leaned against the wall with his hand, thinking. “Maybe, but I can’t make any promises.” He sounded skeptical. And he was gone. Giles breathed deeply and leaned against his pillow. Passively? No. Submissively. There was something nagging at him, though. Giles hadn’t been around the shop for almost a week. Danny, despite his new extra-curricular activities, held a part-time position at a guitar store. It didn’t help that Brett, his co-worker and close friend, hadn’t been speaking to Danny the same since Danny first started hanging around with Greg. Danny felt that there was some kind of game being played, with him involved, that he didn’t know about; it was childish, sure, but far more serious than he knew. Danny had showed up for work late again; this time, it was Brett taking care of the entire shop, and there was a lot of activity. Danny said hello. Brett walked right past him. “That’s not very fucking friendly, you know.” Danny had had enough. So had Brett. “Tell it to someone who cares.” Danny stepped up to him, soberly. “Do we have a problem, man? Cause if we do, you better come out and say it.” Brett was nonchalant. “You tell me.” Danny scoffed. “It’s pretty fuckin’ pathetic when you PMS over me hanging out with some new people. What is this, high school?” “Would you listen to yourself? Better yet, listen to me—” “And why should I?” Danny butted in authoritatively. “Because I’ve been there, man. If you don’t get your head outta your ass and realize that you’re in the wrong crew, it’ll be too little, too late. That’s a promise I can guarantee.” Danny could only chuckle. “Just mind your own goddamn business, okay?” “Mind your head,” Brett responded, not backing down; that wiped the smile off of Danny’s face. Next thing Brett knew, Danny was lunging at him with a fist. Danny cracked him on his face with a solid right hand and sent Brett stumbling into a display of guitars. Danny got up from the wreckage and stepped away, but not before jamming a kick into Brett’s ribs for good measure. “That’ll shut you up,” Danny spat, then left the store, slamming the door on his way out. Brett was gasping for air and grasping his side. He got up, slowly, and managed to clean up the mess that the scrap had caused. Brett looked at his phone. Giles still hadn’t phoned him back. Danny’s friend shook his head and rubbed his side; the affects of Danny’s betrayal still lingered. Brett suspected that they would continue to linger, metaphorically, and he didn’t have the answer. Only Giles did. Or so he thought. He needed Giles. The truth was that Giles was slightly masochistic. He took pleasure knowing that he could withstand pain while others seemed as if they couldn’t. He wasn’t exactly right in his judgment about other people, and he didn’t claim to be; rather, he set high expectations for himself and let others just go about their business. The result was that Giles’s personal relationships were constantly strained and tested because Giles was so insistent on “his way” that others couldn’t penetrate the emotional barrier that he had created for himself. Danny was one relationship, Jessica another, and Natalie another yet. Giles hadn’t made any close friends since Frank died; Natalie thought that Frank’s death might make Giles more open to other people, but it had had the opposite outcome: he was even more closed off. Finally starting to realize this, Giles resolved to pack his bags that night so he would be ready to leave when the doctor told him he could tomorrow. Would he do what was best, which was go back to New York and fix the bridges that were burning? No, he would head to Baton Rouge for the return of AWC’s Fresh!. Neck brace or no neck brace, he was getting into the ring. And he had some business to attend to. With Diego Foster.
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Danny had never been so pleased with himself. He had never felt so good. Greg, his new “boss,” was relying on him more and more. It had only been a week since Danny’s first “job” had gone over without a hitch. Having never made much for cash his entire life, Danny felt both rewarded and wanted by his new “manager.”
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Feeling like he wasn’t needed by anyone, Giles couldn’t sleep for the third night in a row. It wasn’t insomnia; it was inability to sleep. They hadn’t put him on any sedatives at Giles’s own insistence, but that had consequences, just like all of Giles’s long list of stubborn quirks and values. One of those was healing “with as little help from medication as possible,” or so he put it. He didn’t think he was too tough for it or too good for it; he just thought it unnecessary. It was his personal protest against the over-medication of America, or so he thought. Be the change you want to see in the world. Or something.
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