Doing it all Over Again… My Greatest Wish
Bro, this one is one of my favourite stories of all time.. Starts slow.. but worth it. 1st few chapters no sex!! Hope bro will have th patience to read on.. worth it!
Doing It All Over .
Chapter 1
I was feeling stressed that day. That was why I said what I did to the old man. In retrospect it was perhaps the wisest thing I’ve ever said in my life.
I picked him up at a convalescent home in suburban Spokane; a withered, emaciated ninety year old. His race was indeterminable, he was so withered by time but his name on the bank of paperwork the con home staff had given me identified him as So Li, which, I was reasonably sure, made him Chinese. He was suffering from cancer, not just to one particular body part but throughout his entire body.
I took one look at him and knew he wasn’t long for this world. His breathing was ragged and irregular, his skin pale and feverish. His body probably weighed about 75 pounds if he was lucky.
There was absolutely no muscle in evidence upon his bones and his flesh hung loosely from every extremity. Despite all of this he was mentally quite aware of his surroundings, something else I recognized almost immediately.
“How are you doing, Mr. Li?” I asked him, bending over his form on the hospital bed.
“Can’t…” he puffed softly, “… breathe.”
I nodded, taking the stethoscope out of the leg pocket of my jumpsuit and putting it in my ears. I listened to his lungs, hearing nothing but bad news. He was barely moving any air at all.
I’d been a paramedic for eight years but even a newbie could have seen that Mr. Li’s survival on the trip to the hospital was in question. He needed a breathing tube placed in his lungs to help him.
The nurse (and I use that term loosely) was the epitome of white trash. Bleach blonde, sixty or so pounds overweight, and chewing a large wad of bubble gum as she peered at us.
She’d placed a facemask on him but had only turned the flow to two liters per minute. The effect of this was to give him less oxygen than was available in the atmosphere, since the mask was a closed system.
Business as usual in the con home. My partner, without being asked, switched the supply tubing to our portable tank and cranked it up to fifteen liters per minute. This helped Mr. Li a little, but not much.
“He needs to be intubated,” I said to no one in particular, referring to the placement of a breathing tube.
“No, no, no!” the nurse yelled, startling me. “He’s a DNR! You can’t put a tube in!”
Mr. Li gave her a contemptuous glance and I grabbed her arm and pulled her out into the hall. DNR stood for ‘Do not resuscitate’, a physician order, commonly given to people like Mr. Li, ordering paramedics and hospital personnel not to use advanced life support measures to save their life.
After all, what would be the point of bringing Mr. Li back from the dead only so he could continue to die of cancer? But she could have found a more tactful way of informing me of this fact.
“Do you have a copy of the DNR?” I asked her pointedly.
She dug through the file she had for a moment and then produced the form. I looked at it, making sure it was legal. Patient’s name, the words DNR or NO CODE, and the doctor’s signature were all present.
“Okay,” I said, handing it back. “You might consider working on your tact a little in the future,” I advised her. “Mr. Li can hear everything you say.”
She scoffed at this, giving me a condescending look.
“He’s a gork,” she told me, using medical slang for an unresponsive person, or vegetable. “And a gook on top of that. What’s the big deal?”
I turned away from her in disgust. As hardened as I’d become doing this job, it never failed to amaze me how crass, incompetent, and tactless con home nurses could be.
It was one of those situations where you had to figure that if they were any good at what they did, they wouldn’t be working there.
I returned to my patient and looked at him. His breathing, temporarily relieved by the oxygen increase was now worsening once again.
“Mr. Li?” I asked him, speaking loudly in case he was hard of hearing. “I have a doctor’s order not to assist your breathing mechanically. Do you understand?”
Looking in my eyes, he nodded his understanding.
“Is that your wish, sir?” I asked him. “For me not to do anything?”
He smiled slightly. “Yes,” he panted. “It’s…” A pause to breathe, “… my time.”
“As you wish,” I told him.
We loaded him onto our gurney and wheeled him out to the ambulance. Once in the back I hooked him up to my EKG machine in order to allow me to watch his heart rate. I put my pulse oximeter on his finger, looking at the display for a reading.
The pulse ox registered the amount of oxygen saturation in a person’s blood. A normal reading for a person breathing room air was around 99%. Mr. Li was breathing one hundred percent oxygen and his reading was 74%. Yes, he was dying fast.
“Mr. Li?” I addressed him. His eyes creaked open to look at me.
“I’m going to start an IV on you,” I told him. “Maybe they can give you something at the hospital to, you know, help you with the pain and the discomfort.”
He smiled, nodding at me.
I went to work, setting up a bag of saline and hanging it from a hook on the ceiling of the ambulance. His veins were so fragile I was forced to use the smallest needle we carried, the kind that is meant to be used on infants, in order to establish the line.
I threaded it in slowly, cognizant of the fact that advancing it at this rate was probably painful for him.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Li,” I told him when I finally secured the line. “I don’t like to do it that slow but your veins are not in the best shape. It’s better to do it that way than to miss it and have to try again.”
“Thank…” A pause, “… you.”
“No problem.”
While I adjusted the drip rate I noticed him staring at me, a queer smile on his face. He took a few deep breaths, as if he was storing up oxygen, and then started to speak.
“You’re a… good boy,” he said, panting. “You treat me… with… respect… where… others don’t.”
“I’m just doing my job,” I told him, returning his smile.
He shook his head. “Been taken… before,” he said. “Not all… like you. Not at… all.”
“Well,” I shrugged, “I try.”
“What…” he asked, “is your… greatest… wish?”
“My greatest wish?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. He nodded.
I laughed, thinking of my life. I was a thirty-two year old private paramedic who had been doing the job too long. I wasn’t a dirtbag by any means but I wasn’t at the pinnacle of success either. My job was constantly in jeopardy of being taken away by the Spokane Fire Department, who were just itching to get into the ambulance business.
Like many fire departments around the country, they had initiated so many fire codes and regulations over the years that they no longer had any fires to put out. They knew it wouldn’t be long before the tax-payers started wondering just what they were paying these guys for anyway and, as such, their mission for the next century it seemed, was a take-over of the medical aid business. Private ambulance companies, who didn’t have the political clout or the hero reputation to exploit, had already fallen to them in cities and counties all around the United States.
It was a nationwide trend. Spokane FD had already tried twice, getting voted down by the city council once and then, having the same body approve them later, they were stopped by a superior court judge’s restraining order. At my age, I was too old to get picked up by them when they were eventually successful and I didn’t know how to do anything else. I had an ex-wife and an ex-kid to pay money to each month. In short, I was in a rut I saw no way out of and had been dwelling on that, as I’m prone to doing, that shift. For that reason I answered Mr. Li the way I did.
“I’d like to be fifteen years old again,” I told him truthfully, “knowing what I know now. How about you, Mr. Li?”
He smiled, not answering my question. He simply said, “not bad,” and then his eyes closed.
His breathing became rapid for a moment and then ceased entirely. I looked at him in alarm, knowing I could do something about it but forbidden to by a doctor’s order. I’d encountered this situation before in my career but it was never easy.
I watched the heart monitor after his breathing ceased. His heart rate accelerated to more than 160 for a few moments and then began to slow down. It slowed to less then twenty and then ceased entirely, leaving a squiggly line tracing across my EKG machine. The squiggles soon turned to a flat line. Mr. Li was dead.
I finished out my shift, not thinking too much about Mr. Li once I’d dropped him off at the hospital. I ran a few more calls, ate dinner from a greasy fast-food joint, and then went home to my cheap apartment in South Spokane. Once at home I drank a few beers while I watched a movie on HBO. I then put myself to bed, falling asleep and anticipating another twelve-hour shift the following day.
to be cont…
Chapter 1 part 2
Music woke me up; the blaring of my clock radio. The song was “Heat of the Moment” by Asia. That was strange, I realized immediately.
My clock radio was always tuned to a modern music station, the sort that played Matchbox 20, Alanis, Goo Goo Dolls, and other contemporary musicians. I hadn’t heard “Heat of the Moment” in years, since I was a kid. I didn’t remember tuning the radio to a classic rock station and, since I lived alone, no one else could have done so. I opened my eyes and froze solid in my tracks.
I was not in my bedroom; at least not the apartment bedroom I was familiar with. This was the bedroom of my parent’s house in West Spokane, but at the same time, it wasn’t. I’d visited them just the previous week and I knew damn well that my old bedroom had long since been converted to a guest bedroom, complete with new carpet, new bed, and new wallpaper.
This room was set up just like it had been when I’d lived there; wood-grain paneling on the walls (my parent’s had done that back in the 70’s), posters of rock musicians on the paneling. My old stereo, 8-track player was sitting on a shelf near a black and white television set. Dirty laundry was scattered everywhere along with record album covers (Van Halen, Journey, Led Zepplin) and other debris. I stared at this, wide-eyed.
Was I dreaming? I must be, I figured. But it sure didn’t feel like a dream. I sat up suddenly and realized that I felt physically very strong and energetic. There was no ache in my lower back like usual. There was no congestion in the back of my throat from too many cigarettes.
There was no faint headache from the beer I’d drank last night. I even, I realized, had a morning hard-on, something I rarely experienced anymore. I turned my eyes downward, taking in a sharp intake of breath. My chest, bare as always when I slept, was hairless, as if it had been shaven smooth. My stomach was flat, without a trace of the beer-belly I’d begun to develop. What in the hell was going on here?
I pulled myself out of bed, feeling almost high with youthful energy that I’d long since forgotten about. Behind my bed was a mirror with the emblem of Aerosmith etched on it. I’d won it, I remembered, at the county fair when I was thirteen (nineteen years ago! Part of my mind screamed).
I looked into it. Instead of a face with a scruffy growth of beard and bleary red eyes I saw a smooth, unlined face with a tangled mess of long hair atop it. I barely recognized the face before me. It was me when I was a teenager.
I stared at myself (and yet not myself) in this mirror, transfixed. What the hell was going on here? I was not dreaming, I could not even begin to convince myself that I was.
Reality was too firm around me, too detailed. With a start, I remembered the old Chinese man last night. What is your greatest wish? He’d asked and I’d told him to be fifteen again, knowing what I know now. Well I was looking at a fifteen year old’s face in the mirror right now. But that was crazy, impossible. Wishes weren’t granted. Time travel wasn’t possible.
Was it?
A pounding on the door made me jump nearly to the ceiling.
“Bill?” came my mother’s voice. “Are you up? C’mon, you gotta get ready for school.”
School? “Oh my God,” I muttered, staring at the door.
“Bill?” The door creaked open, revealing my mother, only not as I’d seen her the previous week, but as I’d last seen her about seventeen years ago. Her blonde hair had not a trace of gray in it, her face without a wrinkle. She was about thirty pounds overweight, a period she’d gone through, I remembered, when I was an adolescent.
Later she would shed all of those extra pounds. Her eyes locked onto me and I realized I was standing in the middle of the room in my underwear.
“Bill? What are you doing?” she asked, looking at me suspiciously, her mind no doubt thinking about drugs.
“Uh…” I stared back, my mind whirring, “Uh… nothing, Mom. Just trying to, uh, wake up.”
This seemed to ease her mind a little. “Oh,” she said. “Well, hurry up or you’re gonna be late for school. Tracy’s out of the shower now.”
“Tracy?” I said, surprised. “You mean, Tracy, my sister?”
The look she gave me would have been funny under different circumstances. “Yes,” she said carefully, her eyes telling me she was worrying about drugs
again. “How many Tracy’s live in the house, Bill?”
“Sorry,” I said numbly, full of elation. “Still trying to wake up I guess.”
She nodded doubtfully and then, with a last worried glare, shut the door.
Tracy! I thought in disbelief. Tracy my older sister. She’d been killed on the night of her high school graduation when the car she’d been riding in, piloted by a drunken college student had plunged into the Spokane River. Tracy, along with one other teenaged girl, had drowned before she could pull herself out of the submerged car. Tracy was alive!
I sat back down on my bed, my mind now well into overload status. Part of me was refusing to believe what my sensory inputs were telling me; that I was a teenager in the early 80’s instead of a 32 year-old, burned-out paramedic in the late 90’s, that my mother was in her mid-thirties now, that my dead sister had just gotten out of the shower, leaving it free for me instead of resting, decomposed, in a sealed coffin in River View Cemetery. But the cool, logical part of me was forced to accept the circumstances.
I was a teenager again. Would I now have to live through the next seventeen years all over? Could I change things? Was I trapped here now? There were so many ramifications I had to consider. What about Becky, my four year old daughter? What about her? She didn’t exist yet. If I was able to change things, and I did so, Becky might never live. This was deep, very deep shit.
I was still sitting there thinking when my door burst open again, revealing my father. Like my mother, Dad looked considerably younger than I was used to. He was dressed in slacks and a sweater, obviously on his way to Milton Junior High School where he had (did, my mind corrected) taught eighth grade English and Physical Education.
He stared me up and down, probably advised to check on me by my worried mother (Mom had always worried about me being on drugs, I remembered).
“Are you planning to go to school today?” he asked me after a moment.
I stared back at him for a moment. It was strange. I was unable to take parental authority seriously, so long had I been without it, but my father didn’t realize this. Finally I responded. “Yes, Dad,” I told him. “Just heading for the shower now.”
He nodded, seemed about to say something and then decided not to. He closed the door.
I dug through my dresser, pulling out some clothes, marveling over my high school tastes. It seemed I had nothing to wear but 501 jeans and sweaters or T-shirts with rock band emblems printed on them.
What was the weather like? I wondered. Was it summer, spring, autumn, or winter? Should I wear the rock band T-shirt or the rock band sweater? A glance outside informed me that it was winter. There was snow on the ground and angry gray clouds drifting overhead. I found a robe (my old red robe!) in my closet and pulled it over my body, opening my door and heading for the bathroom to shower.
As I passed my sister’s room I looked in and there she was. Seventeen years old or so, wearing a pair of Wranglers and a fashionable sweater. She sat before her mirror, combing her wet hair with a brush.
She gave me a disinterested glance and started to turn back to the mirror but paused when she noticed me staring at her.
To be cont….
“What’s your problem, dickhead?” she asked me, her voice filled with the sibling contempt that had marked our teenaged years. Contempt I’d always felt sorry for after her death.
She looked downright hostile now as I stepped forward and threw my arms around her, hugging her to me. Her body stiffened in alarm and confusion as I did this.
“What the fuck is your problem, asshole?” she barked, pushing me away.
There were actually tears in my eyes, I was so glad to see her again. I found myself speechless for a moment.
She looked at my face, disgust evident in her eyes. “You’re crying? What kind of sick shit is this? Get the fuck out of my room, dickhead.”
“Tracy,” I told her seriously, “you and I are gonna have to sit down and have a talk together.”
“What?” she asked, amazed.
“Later,” I told her. Then I asked, “what’s the date today?”
“Huh?”
“The date?” I repeated. “You know? Month, day…” I paused. “Year?”
She gaped at me, not answering.
“I’m serious, Trace,” I told her. “I’ll explain later. What’s the date?”
“February 18,” she said finally. “Wednesday.”
I licked my lips for a moment. “And the year?”
“What do you…”
“Just tell me the damn year, Tracy!” I commanded, making her jump.
“1982,” she said finally. “Why the hell would you ask that?”
I did some quick mental addition. I was born February 10, 1967. That made me fifteen years old, but with the wisdom (such as it was) of a 32 year old who had already lived through the future. Tracy was indeed seventeen. She would graduate in June of 1983 and be killed later that night. That gave me a year and a half to save her life. I vowed that, if nothing else changed, I would change that. I would shoot the drunken college student dead before I allowed him to drive my sister around.
“Never mind,” I told her. “I’ll probably explain it to you later. It’s good to see you Tracy. I love you.”
“Get the fuck out of here, you fuckin’ pervert!” she screamed.
“And you love me too,” I commented as I exited her room and headed for the shower.
________________________________________
By the time my shower was complete my mind had accepted the facts of the matter. I was fifteen again, it was 1982, and I had the next seventeen years to do over again. What should I do? What would I change? How many past mistakes could I rectify? Could I tell anyone? Would they believe me? And what about Becky? My future daughter preyed on my mind. Was it already too late to have her? I certainly couldn’t go through another two years of marriage with that bitch that was her mother again. Could I?
Putting thoughts of Becky aside, I was cheery as I entered the kitchen and sat down to a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table. Tracy was already there, eyeing me suspiciously but saying nothing. My father, as had been his habit, was eating an English muffin and reading the newspaper. A quick glance assured me that the date Tracy had provided was indeed correct. I looked at the headlines printed on the back of the paper.
SCIENTISTS SAY ALIGNMENT OF PLANETS PRESENTS NO DANGER, read one. Oh yeah. The planets were all scheduled to align this year, which had prompted many to predict that the combined gravitational pull would rip up apart or cause earthquakes or some other such nonsense. Nothing had happened, obviously. AT&T BREAK-UP LEAVES MANY WONDERING, WHAT NEXT? read another. I smiled, thinking I could tell them a thing or two about what was next. REAGANOMICS WORKING, PROCLAIM ECONOMISTS, another declared. And it would continue to for another two years or so until the entire economy came to a crashing halt, signaling the beginning of the next depression, or recession, as it would be termed.
I finished up my breakfast and found, after some searching, my backpack which contained all of my schoolbooks and papers. If my fifteen-year-old self was true to form, I knew my homework wouldn’t be done and my assignments wouldn’t be read. That was something I would have to rectify, I figured. One of the things I regretted later in life were my poor high school grades and study habits, which precluded me from getting into a top-rated college. How hard could the work possibly be now?
A knock on the door signaled the arrival of Mike Meachen, my best friend back in high school. Mike was a year older than I and had always been the dominant member of our friendship. From Mike I learned how to smoke marijuana, how to drink beer, how to smoke cigarettes, how to cut school. Mike would drop out in the eleventh grade and work a few menial jobs for a few years before taking his GED and joining the Air Force where he was eventually dishonorably discharged for marijuana use. I hadn’t talked to him in years but the last I’d heard he was still living with his parents. Could I steer Mike onto a different path? I wondered as I went to the door and bade my family farewell.
Though I was expecting it, it was still startling to see him as a sixteen-year-old again.
“Sup?” he muttered to me, his version of ‘what’s up?’
“Not much,” I told him, careful to give no hint of the startling change in me just yet. I closed the door behind me and we started the two-mile walk to our high school.
I was surprised at the immaturity of his conversation as we trodded to school. It centered on his phony sexual exploits with girls I’d never met, which girls at our school he’d like to fuck, and other adolescent posturing. I had to remind myself that my conversation back then had been pretty much the same and that I now had seventeen years of maturity over him. I nodded and responded to his statements with appropriateness. He noticed no change in me. I’d always been quiet anyway.
As we got close to the school feelings of unreality washed over me again. I was seeing people I hadn’t seen in years. But I was seeing them as they were then, not as my mind was telling me they should look now (I had to keep reminding myself that now was then). They were in ones, two, and even groups of six or more, heading for school. Boys and girls both. I saw Steve Johan, who would join the Army after graduation and be killed in a helicopter crash. I saw Nina Blackmore, a skinny, nerdish, friendless girl who would go to medical school and work as an emergency room doctor at Spokane’s trauma center. She would also acquire good looks early in college as her body filled out and eventually marry a rich neurosurgeon. I saw Carrie Founder, one of the best looking girls in the school giggling with some of the other elite. Carrie I knew, would marry a loser and pump out four kids before divorcing. During that period she would put on nearly a hundred pounds. Eventually, she would end up living in a trailer park with some other white-trash loser. As I paramedic I would one day pick her up for overdosing on anti-depressant medicines and pretend I didn’t know her. I saw lots of others I hadn’t thought of in years and others who’s faces I recognized but who’s names I could not come up with.
I would be lying if I said that my attention was not distracted by the girls. Like many men there was a special place in the part of my mind that controlled lust that was obsessed with the idea of a teenager. It was no doubt because they were forbidden. It was something I’d never done or attempted to do before, knowing that the risks were not worth the benefits. But, a horny part of my mind asked me, things were different now, weren’t they? I was a teenager now! I could do it legally!
I had been shy back in high school, a phase I’d gotten over later in life. But as a result of this shyness, I did not manage to get myself laid for the first time until I was a senior in high school (and to be honest, it was late in the year at that). But I wasn’t shy now, was I? My eyes began tracking through the crowds, taking in the lean forms of the fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year old girls, their tight asses, their firm breasts. I began to imagine the possibilities and my fifteen-year-old dick began to stir in my 501s. Although I intended to do as much good with the gift I had been given-there were so many things I could change or prevent now that I had pre-knowledge of it-it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a little fun, would it? Of course not.
My musings were interrupted by Mike. As we came to the front of the school he jerked my arm, pulling me backward. “We’d better go around the other side,” he said, alarmed. “Richard Fuckface and his asshole friends are standing over there.”
I looked where he was indicating and saw a real blast from the past. Richard Fairview was one of many bullies at our high school. He was about six feet tall and about as dumb as a person could get while still remembering to draw breath every couple of seconds. He’d been one of the terrors of our school, his scam, when he wasn’t beating people’s ass for the fun of it, to post himself at an entry point and rip off lunch money from arriving kids dumb enough to approach him. As always he had five or six companions lounging there with him. They were all smoking cigarettes and eyeing the approaching throngs, looking for targets. I’d had my ass beaten by him a time or two. I wondered if that had happened yet, unable to place just when those occurrences had taken place.
A smile formed on my face. In the ensuing seventeen years I’d learned a lot both about psychology and physical combat. Bullies, I knew, relied mostly on the complacency of their victims. They relied on their size and intimidation to get what they wanted. Very few of them actually knew how to fight. I, however, had worked for at a job where physical assault by one’s patients or one’s patient’s family members was an almost daily happening. Though somewhat of a wimp in high school, life had taught me a thing or two about hand to hand fighting. The most important thing I’d learned was that, while getting hit by a fist was painful, it wasn’t that painful.
“C’mon,” I told Mike, smiling still, heading directly towards Richard and his cohorts.
“Are you high?” Mike asked me. “He’s got his friends there. I could kick his ass any day one on one but his friends will jump in.”
“No they won’t,” I told Mike confidently. “Just watch. Stand back and don’t do anything. His friends won’t get in on anything.”
“Bill?” he said, alarmed, but I strode purposefully forward. Reluctantly, he followed. I had to give him credit. He was loyal, willing to back me up in the face of these six guys.
“Trust me,” I assured him. “Richard’s about to fall from grace, big time.”
As we approached the gang of bullies Richard himself eyed us and stepped forward, blocking our paths. To our right were the chain-linked bike racks. To our left was the school’s perimeter fence. It was Richard’s kind of tactical situation all right, blocking his victim in.
“Hey, Billy-fag,” he hailed, his gray, stupid eyes boring into me. “You got change for a dollar?”
I stared back at him, barely able to suppress a smile. “Yeah,” I told him, my voice full of mocking contempt. “But you ain’t gettin’ it.”
He looked at me in shock, almost stepping backwards at my boldness. I think that he would have backed down right there except for the fact that a group of junior and senior girls were happening by at that particular moment and, hearing my words, stopped to see what would transpire.
“What did you say, you little fuckin’ pussy?” he enquired toughly, in disbelief.
I had to search through my memory banks to come up with a statement that was suitably insulting to a high school bully from the eighties. After a moment I came up with one. “I said, why don’t you suck my dick, asshole? That is if you’re not too tired from fuckin’ your momma all night.”
His friends, as well as the group of teenagers gave a collective gasp. “You gonna let him say that shit to you, Richie?” one of them asked, goading him.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” Richard said, advancing towards me, his fists clenched and raised in a pseudo-boxing stance.
I snorted contempt, which again almost gave him pause. He threw a haymaker right at my face, which, had it impacted, probably would have broken my nose. But it didn’t. I easily sidestepped to the left, allowing his fist to whiz through thin air and spin his body around. Once he was turned away from me I stepped forward and drove my right elbow into his back, right above the kidney, as hard as I could. There was a solid thump followed by the whooshing of air being ejected from his lungs and a startled, painful cry from his lips. His hands dropped instantly down and he staggered forward two steps, holding his back.
I raised my right foot off of the ground and slowly placed it against his ass. With a hard shove of my leg, he was propelled into the chain link of the bike racks, making a musical jing as the metal was struck. He bounced off and landed on his ass on the grass, a stupid expression of surprise on his face.
While his friends gaped, unmoving at this development, the girls all erupted in fits of derisive laughter, pointing at him. As I’d planned, this infuriated him. He leapt to his feet and charged me, meaning to grab hold of me and take me to the ground, I was sure. But he hadn’t learned from his first attack. He threw his weight forward and, once again, I easily stepped around him. As he passed I kicked his feet out from beneath him. He became horizontal for a brief second before crashing to the pavement, scratching up his hands and knees.
As he tried to get to his feet I hooked my foot forward, as if I was performing a kick-off in a football game, and connected directly with his face. There was an audible crunch as his nose was shattered along with several teeth. I pulled my foot back and watched as blood began to pour onto the ground from his face. He seemed quite dazed, frozen in place, so I stepped forward and kicked once more, this time connecting with his rib cage. I felt the crunch of ribs fracturing this time and Richie finally collapsed unmoving to the ground, guarding his side.
I looked at his friends, who were staring at me, mouths agape in disbelief. They could have stomped me to death in less than a minute had they wished but, as I’d figured, they didn’t. I locked gazes with them, putting on the meanest expression I could call up. “You guys want some of this too?” I asked toughly.
None of them answered. They averted their eyes from me, finding objects to peruse on the ground and in the sky.
“Get the fuck out of here then,” I commanded and they instantly obeyed, moving quickly down the path to the school’s entrance.
I looked up to see expressions of unbelieving awe on Mike, the junior and senior girls, and several freshmen kids who had approached. The freshmen would probably have been Richard’s next victims had I not taken action. They were looking at me as if I was Jesus Christ right down from the cross.
I smiled shyly. “None of you saw anything, did you?” I asked.
From the ground Richard was moaning, snorting blood out of his nose and mouth, and holding his side. They all looked at him for a moment and then back at me. A chorus of ’no’s ensued.
“Good,” I said simply, heading towards the school entrance once again. I looked back at Mike, who was still staring, unmoving, at Richard. “You coming?”
“Huh?” He nearly jumped. “Oh, yeah.”
We entered the school, walking through the crowded halls, hearing the slamming of locker doors and the babble of thousands of conversations.
“That was un-fucking-believable!” Mike finally said, looking at me as if I might be hot.
I shrugged. “It was nothing. Those fuckin’ scrotes don’t know how to fight. They just act like they do.”
“Scrotes?” Mike asked, confused. “What’s a scrote?”
Oops. I’d just used a term that, while a common descriptor among Spokane’s paramedics, cops, and firefighters in the nineties, had not been in general usage in high schools in the eighties. A small mistake but I instinctively knew I would have to watch what I said. What if I suddenly started talking about the Persian Gulf War, or the Internet, or something like that?
“Uh,” I said, “something I heard on HBO the other day on a cop movie. It’s short for scrotums. You get it?”
“Oh yeah,” Mike said, grinning as he thought it over. “Scrotes. That’s pretty funny.”
“I thought so,” I said.
Our lockers were next to each other. I remembered that much. The lock was dangling from the handle; a standard, school issued lock. As Mike began twisting the dial on his I simply stared at mine.
“What’s the matter?” Mike asked, looking at me.
I glanced at him. “I don’t suppose,” I said slowly, “that you know what my combination is?”
“What?” he said, confused, staring at me.
I gulped again. I could see in his face that he was starting to pick up that something was different about me.
“I uh…” I said, “I can’t seem to remember my locker combination. A brain-fart I guess.”
“Brain-fart?” he said, cracking up. “Goddam you’re full of ’em today. Was that in the movie too?”
I realized that I’d used another anachronistic term. Christ, this shit was getting complicated. I was going to have to really watch my words. “Yeah.” I nodded. “It was. A pretty funny movie.”
“What was it?” he asked, pulling open his locker and removing some books.
“I forget what the name was,” I answered. “Lethal Weapon, or some shit like that. So, do you know the combo for my locker, or what?”
“Yeah,” he told me. “You remember you gave it to me that time so I could put that herb in it?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering that Mike, who used to sell joints for two bucks apiece, would occasionally store his supply in my locker.
“Anyway, it’s 34-13-23.”
“Thanks,” I told him, grateful. “I remember now.” I began spinning the dial.
“Brain-fart’s over.” He chuckled. “I’ll catch you later.”
He was already out of sight in the passing throngs of kids before I realized that I had no idea what class I was supposed to go to. I stood there by my locker as the halls began to empty before me, trying desperately to think. What was my class schedule in the tenth grade? It was useless. Even looking at my books didn’t help. Seventeen years had gone by after all. That information had long since been purged from my memory.
While I was still trying to figure it out Tracy came tooling by accompanied by her best friend Cindy Kendall. Tracy was giving me a strange look as she passed, a suspicious look. So was Cindy for that matter; a cute blonde who’s image I remembered masturbating to many times during my teenaged years. I remembered seeing a flash of Cindy’s white panties once when she’d been staying the night at our house with Tracy, a brief glimpse when she gotten up from the couch while dressed in her nightshirt. I remembered being obsessed with that half-second flash of those panties for months, able to masturbate to nothing else. Had that happened yet? I didn’t know.
“Tracy!” I barked as she passed. “Come here a second.”
She hesitated, obviously not wanting to be seen talking to her younger brother. But finally she came over. Cindy stayed a distance away, watching us.
“What’s going on with you today?” she asked, glancing around. “You were acting all weird this morning and I just heard you got in a fight with Richard Fairview. And that you kicked his ass. Is that true?”
“Yeah.” I said absently, dismissing Richard Fairview. “But listen, I need…”
“What do you mean ‘yeah’?” she hissed incredulously. “They called an ambulance for him. They say he’s all fucked up! Did you do that to him? You?”
“Kind of,” I affirmed. “But listen, Trace. I need to know…”
“Kind of?” she said. “We’re talking about Richard Fairview. He’s twice your size. How the hell did you…”
“Tracy will you shut the fuck up for a second,” I commanded.
She blinked at me in surprised respect.
“Listen,” I told her, “you and I need to sit down and talk about something. Something that will probably be the most important thing you’ve ever heard.” I glared meaningfully at her, knowing that my face was showing an adult expression. “Things are different with me. Very different. And I’ll tell you about them tonight.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Tonight,” I promised. “But for now I need you to tell me what my class schedule is.”
“Your class schedule?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Yes.” I nodded. “My inability to remember it is part of what I have to tell you tonight. But for now, where the hell am I supposed to go?”
She looked at me for a moment in suspicion, confusion, fear, and awe. Finally she began to speak. “First period you have math…”
She wasn’t able to give me actual room numbers or anything, but she was able to supply enough info for me to get through the day. I arrived in Algebra class just as the bell rang. I had a moment of panic as I looked around the room, seeing all the students at their desks, the teacher at his desk and opening his roll book. Where in the hell was my desk? Was I really in the right first period class?
The teacher, a middle-aged, dark skinned man, looked up to see me standing there. I couldn’t even remember his name. Something Arabic was all that came to me.
“Would you care to take your seat, Mr. Stevens?” he asked mildly.
“Uh, sure,” I stammered, heading for the first empty desk. I was given several strange looks from the teacher and my classmates, leading me to believe I’d chosen the wrong seat. But no one said anything.
A minute later, the class began.
I sat through Algebra without a clue as to what the hell the teacher (who’s name, Mr. Ached, I was finally able to discern) was talking about. I’d always been placed in the college prep classes in high school, a result of my high placement scores on the tests. I’d always been a good test-taker on general knowledge exams with multiple choice questions. So I’d been placed in the college preps where I’d been stoned much of the time and only garnering enough information to pass with a C or even a D in some cases. Algebra was not something I’d used every day in life and I’d come in on it in progress after more than a decade of not using it. I was hopelessly confused by Mr. Ached’s lecture.
My second class, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. American History. In my previous life (as I was coming to think of it) I had an associates degree and half of a bachelor’s degree in History; a subject that had always interested me. A completely worthless degree, I agree, but it’s possession coupled with the obsessive reading I’d done on the subject throughout my life made me an equal (or perhaps even a better?) to the instructor as she lectured on the causes of the Civil War. I found the lecture naive and boring; packed full of basic information that had been scaled down for easy digestion by high school students. She presented the information in black and white, not touching upon a single controversial issue of that time; the sorts of issues we’d relished back in college. Strange, until hearing that lecture, I’d never realized how much we’d been bullshitted and programmed in school.
Third period was Human Anatomy and Physiology. This was a little less boring for several reasons. For one, it was another subject that I was quite knowledgeable about since I’d been forced to learn it at near physician level in order to qualify for paramedic school. It was also not politically scaled down for high school, although it was somewhat more simplistic than what I’d been taught. The second reason was the instructor, Mrs. Crookshank. She was a very attractive woman in her mid-twenties, probably only a few years out of college. I remembered that she’d starred in several of my masturbation fantasies and had been a frequent discussion topic among my peers when the talk turned to teachers we’d like to fuck. As she lectured the class on the circulatory system I found myself watching her body move back and forth to the blackboard, watching her ass beneath the pantsuit she wore, her tits bouncing beneath her sweater. I was older than her, I kept thinking, but yet I was not.
“Now we’ve been discussing the circulatory system for several days now,” she said at one point. “So can anyone tell me the complete route a blood cell takes through this system?”
Obviously she was expecting no hands to go up. It was almost, but not quite, a rhetorical question. She was met with blank looks from her class of thirty or so until I, deciding to have a little fun, put up my hand.
“Yes, Billy?” she asked impatiently. “Do you need to use the restroom?”
I smiled at her shyly. I knew she was expecting nothing from me beyond that. I’d flunked her class. “No,” I told her. “I was going to answer your question.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You know the route a blood cell takes through the circulatory system?”
The class was looking at me now, obviously expecting me to make a joke of some sort, although I was not even known for that sort of behavior.
“I think so,” I said softly.
She gave a patronizing smile. “Well do tell.”
“Okay,” I began. “Why don’t we start with an oxygenated cell as it leaves the heart? Is that a good starting place?”
She raised her eyebrows higher. “Sure,” she finally said.
I nodded. “Okay. An oxygenated cell will be pumped from the left ventricle, through the aortic valve, into the aorta, which will then branch into the descending and ascending aortas. Of course at this point it may be sent to the coronary arteries but let us assume for the sake of discussion that it is not. From the aorta the cell will be pumped through the arteries into the arterioles and finally into a capillary bed somewhere where it will then give up its oxygen molecule to a cell and pick up a carbon dioxide molecule for transport back to the lungs. At the point of transfer the capillaries will become veinuels. The cell will pass through these into veins, eventually making its way to either the superior or inferior vena cava, depending upon what part of the body it just oxygenated.”
Mrs. Crookshank was obviously in shock, as if she’d seen a monkey suddenly start to talk. “Go on,” she said numbly.
I nodded. “The vena cava lead, of course, to the heart. Specifically the right atria. The cell will enter the right atria and will then be pumped to the right ventricle. From there the cell will be pumped through the pulmonary valve to the pulmonary artery, which, I might add, is the only artery in the body to carry unoxygenated blood. The pulmonary artery will take the cell into the pulmonary capillary system where it will drop off its CO2 molecule, which will then be exhaled by the lung, and pick up another oxygen molecule from the alveoli in the lung. From there the now oxygenated cell with pass through the pulmonary vein, the only vein in the body that carries oxygenated blood, to the left atria. The left atria will pump the cell into the left ventricle and the process starts all over.” I smiled. “Takes a little over a minute I hear.”
The class was completely silent, staring at me. Finally Mrs. Crookshank spoke. “That’s exactly right, Billy,” she said. “Very good.”
“I read a little bit on it,” I said, casting my eyes back to my desk.
Next Part starts to get interesting liao…
Will cont if bros want me to. if not dun waste space…
I haven’t got time to read through everything…was skipping parts
But it was really well written and it was all the more touching while listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Baby Can I hold you Tonight?” and reading the first installment.
But of course the story started to get sexy haha.
Ok ok gotta run….please post more so that I can read it tonight when Im back.
Good efforts though…
Can’t up your pts now as i’ve done to someone today.
Maybe tomorrow.
TS doesn’t sounds like a local, still… this is an interesting read, do continue please. Setting up camp here…
cheers
cs
Dear TS, pls continue.
Read this sometime back and I gotta say it’s one of the best non local stories I’ve ever went through.
Makes you feel like what you could have done if you can turn back time.
Thank you for bringing this story back!
At lunchtime it became quickly apparent that I’d altered history, as it was, a little already. As I waited in the snack bar line, and as I found an empty seat on the quad, I could see that people were pointing at me and looking at me. When I would turn to look at them, they would cast their eyes away. I figured the word had spread about my fight with Richie. People were probably in disbelief. I could almost hear the conversations they were having. Him? That little wimpy guy? Kicked Richie’s ass? Sent him to the hospital? How? Does he know karate or something? He must!
I didn’t mind. Obviously the word on the fight had not leaked to the wrong set of ears. If it had, I probably would have been pulled into the principal’s office to talk to the cops. After all, what I’d done was felony assault. Not that I was worried about that either. Would the cops really believe I could have done such a thing?
Finally someone came over to ask me about it. It was one of the hard-core stoner crowd, a group I’d sometimes hung out with but had never really been a part of. I remembered smoking grass with the guy, who was a junior, on occasion, but I could not remember his name. He had long, unkempt black hair and the beginnings of a mustache on his lip. I wondered if he knew how ridiculous it looked. He approached carefully, as if I might suddenly lash out at him.
“What’s up, dude?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “Not much. What’s up with you?”
“Nothin’.” He paused. “I heard you got in a fight with Richie Fairview today.”
“You could say that,” I agreed.
“I heard you put him in the hospital.”
“Wouldn’t know about that,” I replied. “But I doubt he’ll be rippin’ off people for a while.” I smiled. “And if he does decide to go back into business, he might just think twice about who he fucks with.”
The stoner who’s name I couldn’t remember grinned. “You know karate or somethin’?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Just a little about psychology and life.”
His eyes widened. “Trippy,” he finally said, reminding me of a phrase I hadn’t heard in a while. “Listen, me and Raisin and Debbie are gonna blow this scene and head over to Raisin’s house. Smoke some buds and listen to some AC\DC. You wanna come with us?”
I didn’t have the slightest idea who Raisin might be, but I knew who Debbie was, even without a last name supplied. She was a cute, though skanky redhead who hung out with the stoners. She always kept close to whomever possessed the little baggie, hanging all over him and flirting with him. But, if I remembered correctly, she very rarely gave up any pussy. The polite term for her would be cock-tease. And no matter how many times they failed to get laid by her, they still fell for it every time. Thinking of her made my dick stir a little in my pants again. She was older than I was, sure, but I was definitely more experienced. Could I seduce her? And even if I couldn’t, the thought of smoking a little grass was appealing in and of itself. As a paramedic we were drug tested. I hadn’t smoked any pot in the last seven years.
“I’m in,” I told him, standing up and throwing the remains of my burrito in the nearest garbage can.
Apparently Raisin was the one with the pot. I remembered him when I saw him. He was a short, bleached blonde who, like many short people, had adapted humor as his defense. He was one funny motherfucker. We climbed into his car; an early seventies Ford Falcon. My as-yet-unnamed friend and I climbed in the back. Debby climbed in the front with Raisin, who was looking real hopeful about his chances.
As he screeched out of the school parking lot Debbie giggled. “Fire up a joint now, Raisin,” she said. “C’mon. Getting stoned always get me horny.”
“Can’t, baby,” Raisin replied, turning a corner at near-suicidal speed. “Don’t have any rolled yet. Just hold your titties for a few. We have to get some papers.”
She feigned a pout at his words and I took a moment to appraise her. She really was pretty good looking in a future trailer trash sort of way. Her red hair appeared natural, her tits firm and jiggly. As was the style of the eighties, she had on way too much make-up. But I felt I could live with that.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, fresh no matter how skanky she appeared. I was determined to bag her. I thought I knew how.
Raisin pulled the Falcon into the parking lot of a gas station/convenience store. He backed into a spot near the back corner.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Raisin told my back seat companion and me. “Bill, how much money you got?”
I shrugged. “About three bucks or so.”
“Good,” Raisin said. “You go up to the counter and buy a candy bar or something. Lonnie,” he turned to my now-named companion, “while he’s got the clerk distracted, you swipe a pack of papers from the display.”
“Man, I hate doing this shit,” Lonnie whined. “Why don’t we just use a toilet paper roll or somethin’?”
“Do I look like a fuckin’ barbarian?” Raisin enquired. “I refuse to smoke out of something that used to hold paper I use to wipe my ass with. Just get the fuckin’ papers.”
Lonnie exited the vehicle, still whining, and I exited with him.
“Why don’t we just buy the papers?” I asked, following behind him.
“Because,” he explained, as if I was an idiot, “they won’t sell ’em to kids.”
“As far as I know it’s not against the law to buy papers,” I opined. “Let me handle this.”
Lonnie was doubtful but obviously agreeable to anything that didn’t put him in harm’s way. I pushed through the door of the store, making a little bell chime. The clerk was smoking a cigarette and watching a small television set. He was about twenty or so and looked as if he’d been rolling up some herb himself. He eyed us suspiciously as we entered.
I pulled out my money and then pulled a pack of rolling papers from the display and put them down on the counter. The clerk looked at them for a minute and then looked at me.
“How old are you, kid?” he asked, taking a puff off of his smoke.
“Fifteen,” I said.
“Uh huh. And what are you going to do with those? Let me guess, they’re for your father.”
“Nope,” I said simply, shaking my head. “They’re for my friends and myself. You see, we just scored some killer bud and now we want to smoke it. That requires papers, as I’m sure you’re aware. So, how much?”
The clerk stared at me for a moment, not saying anything.
“Now come on,” I said reasonably. “Would you rather we came in and tried to steal them? That would be counter-productive for all concerned, wouldn’t it? We’re not asking to buy cigarettes, just papers. They’re not controlled substances are they?” I smiled. “C’mon, didn’t you used to cut school and get stoned? Help out the younger generation here.”
He stared for another instant and then began to chuckle. “Fuckin’ classic,” he said, shaking his head. He picked up the pack of zig-zags and rang them up. “79 cents.”
I started to hand him a buck and then paused, my eyes looking at a display behind him.
“Oh,” I said, “and how about givin’ me a three pack of those rubbers there? The unlubricated ones.” I winked at him. “I think I might find some use for them.”
He chuckled some more and grabbed the condoms, tossing them next to the papers and ringing them up. I paid him, thanked him for his customer service, and then we headed out the door.
“That was fuckin’ radical,” Lonnie proclaimed as we walked across the parking lot. “Totally!”
“Let me tell you somethin’, Lonnie,” I told him. “I’ve found that you’ll get a lot farther in life using that approach then tryin’ to sneak around the issue. Keep that in mind.”
“Trippy,” he said again. “But why’d you buy the rubbers? You don’t think you’re gonna get into Debbie do you?”
“You never know,” I told him. “It’s best to be prepared for any eventuality.”
“Avent-you-what?”
“Never mind,” I said, opening the back door. The condoms were in my pants pocket. The papers I tossed to Raisin. “Let’s go get stoned,” I told him.
________________________________________
As I suspected she would be, Debbie was putty in my hands. We went to Raisin’s house, which was actually an apartment. I’d been in the apartment complex many times as a paramedic on calls. It was populated with various varieties of unemployed trash living on welfare. It was strange being in them in a way. They looked exactly the same as they had\would in my when. Raisin’s mom, a single mother, was employed and spent the day at her job.
This made Raisin’s apartment a favored locale for school cutting, pot smoking teenagers. The apartment was cleaner than most I entered on calls, but not by much. It was a two bedroom and there were dishes scattered everywhere but at least the laundry was picked up and there were no roaches in evidence. The entire place reeked of stale cigarette and pot smoke.
Raisin put on an AC\DC album, Highway to Hell, and cranked up the volume. He then went about the task of rolling up a fat one which he lit and passed around. Predictably Debbie sat next to him on the couch, cooing at him and flirting with him. By the time the third cut on the album was playing, we were all pleasantly stoned; me probably more so than the others since I’d been away for a while.
“Isn’t Bon Scott the greatest fuckin’ singer on earth?” Raisin asked the room at large.
Lonnie gave a concurring opinion and even Debbie agreed, although it was easy to read her face and see she didn’t give a rat’s ass about Bon Scott. I tried to remember who teenaged girls had been into back in the early eighties and drew a blank.
The conversation traveled around the room for a few minutes, long enough for me to be appalled by its immaturity. Both Raisin and Lonnie were trying like hell to win Debbie’s favor but their attempts were pathetic at best. Lonnie was talking about how many push-ups he could do. Raisin was talking about how many beers he could drink before he puked. Had I been like this once? I feared I had. No wonder I hadn’t gotten laid until I was nearly eighteen. It was time to liven up the conversation a little.
“Have you guys ever considered,” I asked, “how much religion has fucked up our views on sex?”