After they shot me up with Dilauded, it gets mushy. CNN was on; we wound up watching it after all. I had been crying for two hours now, not because I was in pain, because I knew every fifteen minutes spent in the ER was another month set back. Now my Mom knew, she got that dreaded middle of the night phone call but Cindra was a champ and laid it all out for her.
Ray?
Mona.
Cindra? What’s wrong?
What’s wrong? Is a common follow-up to hello when you get on the phone with my mother. What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Or what happened? That last one is reserved for when you drop shampoo in the shower and she thinks you slipped and broke your neck.
One day, I will see an analyst who will tell me that my irrational fear of zombies has a direct link to the aforementioned follow-up questions. And when she reads this sometime tomorrow she’s going to say that I exaggerate. Just like all the times she was late to pick me up from school in the dead of winter on Long Island. It was the janitor, Large Sarge and I. Sarge, the large, blonde 60-year old something was the head of security at Smithtown High School.
Early in my sophomore year, I went to the bathroom during health class. When I closed the stall door, there was a HUGE swastika drawn in sharpie behind it. Sarge’s office was across the hall and I stopped in there before getting back to learning about why girls get their periods. I was very upset, more than the swastika I was angry at my parents for putting me into a situation where someone would be ignorant enough to put a symbol of hatred on the back of a bathroom stall, probably without knowing what it meant. About 15 minutes passed and the bell rang, I walked by the bathroom again. It was now blocked off and there was Sarge scrubbing off the swastika herself. That anecdote has nothing to do with my story, I wasn’t sure how I would ever fit that in somewhere so I did it here because it really upset me and the last person I ever expected to see scrubbing it off was a woman who looked like she could be on the East German women’s olympic wrestling team. So there.
I was not always late.
Mom, you were always late.
Ok fine Raimy, I’m a bad mother, what do you want? You want to give me back? Would you rather I am like one of your friend’s mothers.
She loves to pull that one out; she knows that’s is the one thing I wouldn’t argue back about. There was no fucking way I would have traded my Mother for anyone else’s.
No, I just want you to be on time. I could get serial killed.
The reason we moved here is so that you could be out after dark and not have that happen.
Nothing would happen to me after dark in Brighton Beach except that I would have been home for two hours already. People still want to stick us in ovens here.
Then take the school bus Raimy; what do you want me to tell you?
The hospital was, for lack of a better description, dead. The drunken kids must be having their stomachs pumped in Goshen. Maybe this is where they take poor people and no one is poor in Warwick. Who knows?
Raimy had an accident. She broke her ankle… in a few places. But she’ll be ok! The orthopedic surgeon on-call is an ankle specialist…
I knew it! I had a feeling something was wrong.
She always “knew” it; there was always a “feeling” before something terrible happened. My theory is that if you always think something terrible is going to happen, when it finally does then you are always right.
I don’t always think something is wrong, that’s you father. He’s the negative one, not me.
No, no. You’re never late either.
She’ll flick the back of her hand under her chin about now say, “Gai kukken afen yam!” which, in Yiddish means, Go shit in the ocean! Why this is an insult, to anyone other than the ocean? I have no idea. Then she’ll offer to make me breakfast.
They rolled in another stretcher. Now the TV was off and all I heard was the low hum of the lights and the faint sound of that poor kid next to me crying. This was maybe the fourth or fifth frantic call made to my mother in my lifetime.
The first time I ever smoked pot and drank Jack Daniels I was juuust barely out of high school. This incident is known among my close friends as the Dorito Bag Incident. There is no such thing as moderation to an 18-year old who never drinks. Nor is there any sort of appreciation for the painstaking time and effort that goes into making a glass of whiskey. Especially when you are pouring it into a solo cup with ice and orange juice.
Ten minutes after taking bong hits I was rolling around on the floor doing Joan Rivers impressions. Twenty minutes after that, I was singing Ace of Base into the toilet puking and talking to my dead Grandpa Frank, who was very upset with me. I’m a model student. I shouldn’t be acting this way; grandpa is so upset with me. About ten minutes after that poison control was called, then my mother. My parents where there in five minutes. And my Father was made to stay in the car. When my Mom came in, six very scared, pre-collegiate, moderate achievers stood before her. She was looking at her prodigal child in the bathroom, splayed out on a tile floor in her underwear with pieces of Doritos speckled in her hair. She looks back at them.
Girls, did Raimy smoke marijuana?
Yes Mrs. Rosenduft she did.
Then the door closed. Now, you have to understand, I don’t remember any of this-this is all folklore that has been retold to me over the years by friends and my parents. Apparently, there was laughing, followed by retching, followed by a question about why Amy has empty Dorito bags rubber banded around her wrists and the sink if filled with Doritos?
Sheessspuhling myharrr outmyface.
My father was called in. This was pre-heart attack Dave, the Dave that could lift his comatose child off the bathroom floor and carry her out to the car while she wrapped her arms around his neck saying things like, “Daddy I love you, I don’t tell you enough but I do… I think I’m going to barf.”
The following morning I would wake up on a fold out cot at the foot of their bed, my first real hangover. I called into my mall job and told them I ate some bad fish. My mother looks at me for a while then, “That was strike one. You have two more strikes or you don’t go to away to school at the end of the summer.”
I was good after that; I never wanted to drink again! I’d made it through high school only drinking three times, never doing drugs, always being the DD and always the responsible one. A few weeks later, I was getting into my car for work. I pulled down the sun visor and two photos fell out. They were of me after we got home that night. There was dry heaving in the downstairs toilet and there were pictures, two pictures to be exact. One of me with my head resting against the bowl and the other leaning up against the wall with my eyes rolled into the back of my head and both my thumbs in the up right position. There was a post it note that said, “Please drink responsibly.”
So no, I would have never traded parents with anyone else. And I would continue to torture them well into my 20s when I moved back to the city and discovered the scene.
They put me in a room with three empty beds, the charity room, I was by the window. The nurse was attaching the saline bags and a morphine drip. Cindra sat on my bed until I fell asleep and then she went back to that tiny motel we found alone. I was in and out for a few hours. I could hear the rain hitting the window as the dawn went to work. Around 8 o’clock, two hours before visiting hours began, my Mom walked into my hospital room. My eyes were so swollen I could barely see her. She sat at the foot of my bed in silence; we didn’t need to say anything now, because she was right on time.
259.
On September 26, 2009 I slipped on wet grass at a drive-in in upstate New York, I was hospitalized for two days and required emergency surgery. I am unemployed and I have no health insurance. The hospital bill for two days was $31,000. I was given assistance through The Bon Secours charity program but was still left with $12,000 to cover on my own.
So, I asked 12,000 people for $1 dollar. In one week, I raised enough money to settle my current bill making this online fundraiser not only green, with little or no carbon footprint but a testament to the power virtual communities being highly effective when used for social change!
Email: raimyrosenduft@gmail.com
Twitter: twitter.com/muthafunka
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