It was the last night before went somewhere.
I guess it was kind of an occasion. I met my friend Tom for some drinks. We went to a dive bar, like we usually did. We decided to take the subway, back closer to where we lived. I can remember standing on the platform. It was dark, out in the industrial part of Brooklyn. Very quiet and calm. The train track looked like it could be from 1901 or 2001.
We had to sit there for a while and I was worried I'd lose my slight buzz. I was trying to calm down on the cigarettes, but I was smoking one. Tom too.
We got on the train that would take us to Carroll Gardens. We went to a bar we'd been a few times. A cool little hole in the wall. They had some good music playing. The bartender was a fat guy. He had a beard too. He knew Tom and instantly started talking about the mixes of music he'd put in the jukebox. He went on and on about it, and we smoked and smoked.
Finally a woman I recognized came in. She came into the copy shop I was working in at the time. She was the press agent for a local musician who wrote children's songs. She came in almost every day.
She was a little goofy. A little big, and she had a big head. She was cute, though I'd never thought of her being pretty. She was nice enough, but I bit glazed over. Like you'd talk to her and there'd be kind of a catch. A lag. Not stupid, but slow.

I was flipping through TV channels yesterday and saw an interesting scene on a popular Korean soap drama.
Men were lined up in a row, like in the army. A commander of some kind was walking up and down the line, yelling at his men.
But they weren't wearing uniforms. They weren't soldiers, they were construction workers, and it was the beginning of the work day. The leader looked like a drill sergeant, and he occasionally beat the workers.
In western countries, at least in the U.S. and Canada, we have several negative stereotypes of construction workers. That they aren't intelligent, they like to drink beer and eat out of lunchboxes while sitting on high beams, that they couldn't find a job where they can use their brain so they work with their hands.
But there are stereotypes of construction workers that are relatively positive; along the lines of firemen or policemen. Hard working men wearing flannel muscle shirts, bringing home the bread to wifey. These images are not uncommon in American commercials and entertainment.
In Korea construction workers are shit. They are the lowest rung on the social ladder. They are in every sense of the word, slaves.
The money is not horrible, though nothing like it generally is in the United States. Typically, the workers are paid daily. There are construction companies, but by in large it's freelance work, so I've been told.
I once had an English conversation student who worked as a construction worker. He would come to class every day looking like he'd been beaten up. This is not an exaggeration. His hands and face were bruised, sun torched, and his clothes filthy. He'd lie in his chair like a bag of bones and would often have trouble speaking.
He told of getting beaten by his superiors, having rocks thrown at him while doing his job; if he wasn't working fast enough.
If you ever have the pleasure of seeing a building in Korea go up or be torn down you can imagine what's going on inside. These men are often working out of pure fear and they work incredibly fast. Just two buildings down from mine an old office building was complete gutted and cleaned in about a day and a half. All that's standing now is the steel frame. My guess is that in less than a week they'll have a completely new building around it.
I've heard that migrant workers make up a sizeable part of the construction work force in Korea. I haven't seen this first hand, but I have seen migrant workers going off to work in factories.
Yesterday I went to a Pakistani restaurant located in a factory district in Busan. Restaurants like this are almost unheard of in Korea where foreign restaurants are usually confined to the "rich" or university areas of the city. The exception being some Russian and Chinese joints were sailors and soldiers hang out.
But the idea of a restaurant being supported by migrant workers from factories population is quite new. But sure enough, while eating there we saw a handful of workers from Uzbekistan and the Philippines come in.
One man, who was dark skinned, had a Muslim-style beard, and was speaking Russian accented English, looked to be a particularly rough character. He had that "bag of bones" look I referred to earlier. He also had what looked to be a homemade tattoo of a dagger on his arm.
As Korea becomes more of an economic player in the world economy workers like these will likely become more common. Wealthy people don't want to do shitty jobs so they let someone else come to their country and do it.
But I've said before, I can't imagine a worse place to be an immigrant worker than in Korea. I think Japan could be pretty lousy for similar reasons, but Japan is more open to Western ideas so I can't help but think that would lead to slightly better conditions. China would be bad, but China has a relatively mixed population. It'd be summarily bad for Chinese and foreigners alike.
Don't get me wrong, this along with a lot of things, is changing in Korea. But I've always felt that if North and South Korea had an open border there would be such a vicious racism against the people from the North for the same lower on the totem pole ideas.

It started with a phone call in the morning. I answered my phone, just as I always do, "hello?"
It was a wrong number. The guy was mostly speaking English, but another language too. It took me longer to get my point across.
"You have the wrong number," I said twice, once quickly and once very slowly. I've never been one to say "I'm sorry but..." in that situation.
He hung up.
I resumed getting ready for work. The phone rang again.
I looked at the number. It was the same guy. I debated just letting it ring and ring. Eventually he'd get the idea and give up. But then I'd have to listen to my phone vibrating again and again. Sometimes the vibration is worse than a ring, especially if the phone is on a desk or a wood floor. Then it sounds like a drill. So I picked up the phone.
"Hello?"
He started talking. He was speaking Korean. "Hey," I said, cutting him off, "you still have the wrong number."
He swore. In English. Not necessarily at me, but at the situation, I suppose. Something about sex.
I suppose in this kind of situation I have a tendency to go a bit overboard. I have a hot temper at times. I swore back, but unlike his, my swear was not at the situation. Rather, I swore at him very directly. I won't repeat it here, but it had to do with feces, anger, sex, and his mother.
There was a pause. I'm not sure what either of us was waiting for, and I don't know why I even stayed on the phone. After I said what I did I had clearly given myself the opportunity to hang up. I was victorious in some sense. I should have hung up and in retrospect I wish I had. But somehow, because of what I'd said, I couldn't hang up. I knew I'd gone overboard. Perhaps I had been overly sensitive. Pitying him in some way.
He said something back to me. It wasn't so much what he said, but the way he said it. Still, it had very little effect on me. He and I both knew that. So he swore again. It was a bit biting, a bit graphic. Again, I won't repeat the comment here, but it was in the realm of my father, his penis, my penis, and the Earth.
It stung a bit. I had an inclination to rear back and really tell him something special. Something he'd never forget.
But given the context, what I had said, what he had said, the fact that he had dialed the wrong number in the first place; there was very little he could do to compensate. And he in fact hung up first.
I left my apartment and headed to the subway station. I replayed the conversation in my head a few times. I had no regrets, and for that, I felt good. I had, with swiftness, and just the perfect pitch of audacity, put him squarely in his place.
I mean, imagine, calling a wrong number, and being so frustrated, that you would erupt with something like what he'd said. My pity towards him disappeared as I held my subway card against the sensor.
I got on the train comfortably. I sat down and scanned the car firstly for attractive women, secondly for brightly colored objects and/or clothes, thirdly I perused over the people in my immediate proximity, and then finally to the advertisements and lights above me.
People got on and off the subway. I glanced at the new faces, and watched some of the more attractive ones through the window as they left the group for unseen destinations.
I focused on one person in particular, a young beautiful woman, whose eyes I instinctively and absolutely avoided, but whom I never passed a chance to cast a deep, unknown, gaze through. This was totally unbeknownst to her.
Eventually, she sensed someone was looking at her. Her eyes darted from person to person, but as she arrived at mine I steadfastly looked somewhere else until the coast was clear. Then, I returned to her, my stare even more piercing than before.
Dressed simply, she wore blue jeans and a red sweater. It looked to be cashmere. Very soft. She was still, not moving at all save her eyes, which from time to time, attempted to pick up my perpetrating eyes. This went on for some 10 minutes.
As I enjoyed this little game of cat and mouse I began to have the distinct feeling that I was being watched.
Someone's eyes were following me. I calmly scanned around the subway. Eyes avoided mine; others glanced into mine, and then hurriedly looked away. First I scanned the opposite row to mine. Then my own row. Intermittently I let my eyes dive back to the woman in the red sweater.
I didn't immediately fear the vaguely Asian looking man in the black coat and red baseball cap when I realized he was the one staring at me. But as it became clear that he had been staring at me for some time; that I had sensed the stare absolutely correctly; and that there was some purpose to this mysterious stare, struck fear in me.
I looked away and tried to focus on a woman on my left who'd just gotten onto the train. She had a light blue blouse that was a little fuzzy. I stared directly into her front for a long time. But no matter how hard I tried to ignore, I could still feel the man in the red cap looking at me.
It was then that I realized who he was.
I knew the man looking at me was the man who'd called me just 30 minutes before. I could sense this. Somehow he had found out who I was. Where I was. Perhaps where I was going.
The question was not who, but why.
Why did he take the time to find me? Was he so angry about what I had said?
My first instinct was to immediately get off the train. I sat up. Instinctively, I looked at the woman in the red sweater.
To my surprise she was looking at the man, who sat almost directly in front of her. Then she looked at me. Had she seen this situation unfolding? Had she sensed his anger? My innocence? Could she help me? Could she save me?
I tried calm myself. I took a deep breath. My eyes fluttered into the middle of the train car, but then back into his direction. Even if it was somehow him, and say I ran off the subway car at that moment, what could he do? Follow me? Shake his fist at me? Pull out a gun? Shoot me? In front of everyone?
My fear seemed ridiculous.
I took a deep breath and set out to count to 60. In 60 seconds he would get off the train, or would find someone else to stare at, or, at the very least realize that dialing the wrong number and the swears that followed; were merely said in the heat of the moment.
As my count approached 45 seconds my eyes had drifted to the man's shoes. As I sullenly climbed his body, to his knees, his chest, his chin, up his jaw line, I prayed his eyes wouldn't be fixed on me.
But they were.
His expression wasn't one of hatred, I noticed. He didn't seem to be angry. He was calm, but also very...amused. Despite his seriousness he seemed slightly pleased by the situation.
I thought about what I had said to him. Was it so bad? Maybe it was.
My stop had arrived and I had to think fast. It was a popular stop typically. Half the people would be getting off the train at once. It would be difficult and perhaps dangerous, but if I were just able to get lost in the shuffle I might survive. If he didn't see me initially, I might have a chance. I cast a quick farewell gaze in the direction of the woman with the red sweater. Her face was obstructed by a man reading a newspaper. It was tragic, but I had to leave. She would have to survive in my memory. I stared hard at her chest one last time.
There's wickedness in people, I thought to myself as the train accelerated toward my stop. A relentlessness, a viciousness that is revealed every time man is merely himself. It is his instinct. His will. I had revealed mine when I had said what I did, and now he was doing the same in his pursuit of me.
I contemplated this as I calmly stood up to get off the train. I was sandwiched between two people. If he was following me could I move quickly? I wasn't sure. But I could only drift out of the train and hope.
As the doors closed I began to turn my head to see if, indeed, the man in the red cap was following me.
He wasn't.
With the doors safely shut I stopped mid-step and turned around. I saw the red cap, just obstructed by the train's window pane.
As the train lurched forward, toward me, I saw the woman red sweater quickly stand up and move across the aisle. She said something to the man in the red cap and put her hand on his shoulder as she sat down. The man was shaking his head. His amused smirk had turned into a broad smile. A volatile, demonic, satiated smile.
As the pair became even with me I could see they were both laughing, and to my surprise, both had turned and looked at me. They were laughing at me.
I couldn't imagine what had prompted the laughter. My memory of the phone call, the insults, my theory of his following me, all disappeared. I was standing on the platform. Not far from where I stood two people were laughing at me.
I extended my arm and made a hand gesture indicating sex. Like sight on a gun I let the gesture follow them, their train car, and then the train itself, until even the lights, and even the sliver of sound had disappeared into the tunnel.

My downstairs neighbor smokes. He smokes and it drifts up into my apartment. I live on the 17th floor, so it's a little surprising it wafts up here. At first, when I moved into my apartment, I thought it must be coming under the front door, since a lot of people smoke in the hallways around here. I even considered it might be coming through my wall, which sounds ridiculous, but if you could see my apartment you might not think so. It's modern, only two years old, but like a lot of things in South Korea, its made to last about 5 years, if that.
So here I am, typing, not smoking, like I used to, but smoking all the same, every hour or so. Not pleasant.
The other night I went out with a co-worker. We found what we thought was a bar called Kenny Rogers, but it turned out to only be a singing room. We saw another bar, called Menchester, which we thought might have pitchers of beer, since that's all we really wanted. But no, that was a cocktail bar. Finally we found a beer called, in English, Fresh Beer. That was the ticket.
My co-worker gave up smoking in April. I haven't smoked habitually for 2 years. Korea is a tough place to give up smoking because it costs about $2 a pack. My co-worker talks to me about smoking like I just gave it up last week, I think because he feels like he gave it up last week. I've gotten to the point with smoking that I never crave it physically, but I sometimes miss the process; as I suppose many smokers do.
During the day, before we went out together, my co-worker made a couple jokes about smoking that night. Again, like we'd both just given it up. I think he came around to the idea that I didn't care one way or the other and started making "don't let me do it" kind of jokes. That night, walking down the street, as we looked for a bar, my co-worker started looking for cigarettes.
"They'll go out and get them for you at some bars," he said almost rhetorically, I think to me.
I suddenly wondered if I should play the role of the "hey man, maybe you shouldn't do it" guy.
"Are you sure you want to do that?" I said with very little enthusiasm.
He did want to. He disappeared into a mart. We found the Fresh Beer place rather quickly after that.
I quit smoking before I came to Korea, and then restarted within a month of arriving. In part due to the economical reasons stated previous, and partially because you can smoke virtually anywhere any time in Korea. Including the workplace.
At my first job in Korea we used to teach 50 minute classes with a ten minute break in between. At nights, the further end of the hall, even on the 12th floor, I could find 5 or 10 of my co-workers, and a handful of students lighting up next to the coffee machine.
It was an event...a party, every hour. It was very manly as well. Women, if they smoke, don't smoke with men. This is changing, like most things regarding gender, but in the time that I smoked at the end of the hallway at my school, I saw a total of one woman smoking there and she rushed to put out her cigarette when I, a teacher, walked up.
It was a real boys club. There were instant coffee cups with cigarette butts stubbed out in the dregs strewn on the floor along with spit, farmer nose blows, food wrappers, hair, the whole bit. There was one window with a sprawling view of the ghetto that led to the local bridge. It must have looked like a chimney from the outside.
Who could pass that action up? Well, me after I contracted bronchitis and was told by a doctor to lay off for a while. That was enough for me to not start smoking again. That is, until my downstairs neighbor just lit up again.

I was looking at my textbook yesterday. There was a story about a woman that lived in the Polish area of Chicago. It reminded me of Christen and her apartment on Cortez Street in the Ukrainian section on the west side of Chicago.
You get old enough, and the stories and experiences pile up like a bunch of dirty clothes.
When I think of Christen's apartment I think of manic love, extreme weather, Elliot Smith, wood floors and the steps that led up from the front door, past the strange anonymous neighbor, and into her rickety apartment.
We'd met at a friend's wedding, in Las Vegas. I sat across from her at a mediocre buffet. I noticed she had sweat rings under her arms to go along with the hair under her arms. She was confident, even cocky, and had a big mouth; literally.
I followed her around that weekend like a puppy. If she was doing something I wasn't, then I was sad. If she wasn't in the same room as me I was sad. She even played the horse race game with me. When she left at 3 a.m. Monday morning, to go back to her little world in Chicago, I nearly cried.
And somehow, despite her having a boyfriend at the time, despite me living a few thousand miles away in Oakland, California, through weeks of rigorously planned emails, Christen called me at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon on the free 800 phone number my roommate had illegally set up for me through his job at a non-profit long distance phone service.
Again I was reconnected with that Las Vegas feeling. That cracking conversation. That wit. The confidence. I hung up after an hour feeling like it had lasted a minute. The following week she and her boyfriend had broken up. A couple weeks after that I was on a plane to Chicago.
We met in Midway Airport. She was a couple minutes late, but she came. She brought me a collector's tea spoon that said Chicago. I brought her a corsage; she'd never been to prom. Minutes later we were filling up her 84 oxidized Volvo in the cool October evening air just outside the airport.
There's nothing like Chicago in California. The brick, the bags in trees, the alleyways people honk as they drive through. The closest thing is San Francisco, and I love San Francisco dearly, but I was born there. Being born can't compare to helplessly falling in love and chasing it halfway across the country. Chicago sounded, felt, and wreaked like a city in a way I'd never known.
That night, after drinking a couple of beers in her kitchen, we got close. "You’re snuggly!" she said. I snickered through my nose. It was the only sound I could manage. I was so attracted, scared, joyful, hopeful, and speechless. We kissed for the first time.
I was a lost cause. I idolized Christen. I loved her city. I loved the dark windy evenings where the naked branches swayed and disappeared into old apartment buildings and factories. I loved her goofy brothers who grew hot peppers in a broken down loft that had a board for a door. I loved the way she pulled me into a pile of leaves outside Frank Lloyd Wright's former home.

I never saw Florence's cat Rusty until I had been visiting her for over a month. After that I'd occasionally see him jumping off Florence's wheelchair and running into the bedroom as I walked in her front door.
Rusty was scrawny and old although I often saw him running, which made him appear spry. I did touch him one time, and his back felt like a line of stones. He bucked forward under my touch and ran into the bedroom.
Florence liked Rusty, but I never got any sense that she couldn't live without him. Rather, it seemed Rusty was there because he was a cat, and because Florence was old and lonely, and needed a cat. I guessed someone gave her Rusty. Someone who decided Florence was old and lonely and needed a cat. There was never much excitement when Rusty was around. He would, she told me, sit on her lap during part of the day, and the other part of the day he'd lay under the bed.
Florence had pictures of other cats that she'd had during her life. Odd looking Polaroid snapshots; a black cat wearing a bonnet, a tabby with red eyes wearing a Santa Hat, and a fat older looking cat that looked like it was at the end of its life.
Cats always present something of an unknown. This is both attractive and repelling. A cat is certain of himself, and chooses his friends discerningly. Cats also suffocate babies, and could possibly survive independently, as opposed to dogs who love unconditionally out of fear and ineptitude.
In the end, Rusty would fall into the unknown category. One day his behavior became strange and ornery and he attacked Florence's arm unprovoked. He gashed her arm open and she had to go to the hospital. Naturally, Rusty was taken away by the Humane Society and likely euthanized within the week

Most of Florence's family lived in Livermore. Her oldest daughter Sheri was closest, or she had sought to move the least more likely, but she was furthest in the sense that they rarely spoke. I met the bitch in the Wal-Mart parking lot, in passing. She was with one of her daughters, who worked at Wal-Mart. We barely said hi, and she seemed shameful in some way. Here, was a stranger, who spent more hours in a day with her dying mother than she did in a year. The situation was shameful, as was her plump unkempt appearance.
"Sheri, this is XXXX, the man who takes wonderful care of me," Florence said proudly.
Sheri squeezed out some fake pleasantry and said she'd better get back home. Home to what, I thought. Home to the idiot box you spend your entire days hugging? Home to your potato chips and ranch dip?
At some point Florence and Sheri stopped speaking to one another. It had to do with Sheri's oldest daughter, the one person in the family that regularly visited Florence. Eventually it led to Sheri not speaking to Florence at all.
Florence's other daughter Vikki was better than Sheri, but that wasn't saying a lot. She would at least talk to Florence on the phone, if only to watch the same TV program over the phone for 5 minutes.
"Oh, you’re watchin' that? Lemmie turn it on for a second."
"Oh, yeah. There he is. I don't like him."
"Well, I suppose we all...have our path in life."
"--He chose his. We all do."
"So whatcha been doin'?"
"Oh, ok. I'll talk to you later honey."
Vikki received workers compensation for a back injury she'd gotten working at one store or another. Eventually she'd start coming over to Florence's more regularly when she herself was hired to be one of the care providers.
Both daughters had their own children, who, as far as I could tell were all mediocre. The shining star was the aforementioned daughter of Sheri, who had an office job, and at 19, like Florence, like Sheri, like Vikki, had a daughter.
"I did it, they did, and their kids do it," Florence told me. "And now Sheri's second daughter is pregnant. When's it going to stop?" she asked me in a purely rhetorically way. "When are people goin' to figure it out?" She stared at the TV.
"You know, we all used to live together," she told me, "I had a two bedroom apartment on the other side of town where I lived with my Mom. I used to live there with my husband, but I kicked him out. So anyway, my Mom moved in, and then Sheri and her first husband got divorced. She met Jim and they moved in. So I slept on the couch. Then, Vikki and her boyfriend at the time moved in. None of them were workin.' Me and my Mom were working. Eventually, Jim got a job."
Florence told me this slowly and, like most things she said, in a monotone voice. She let them unfold. But they weren't so much stories as they were recountings.
"Sheri had a daughter by then, I forgot to say that. But she mostly lived with her Dad...and I didn't like that. He wasn't a good guy...you could say. But we didn't have any room. Finally, we got a bigger apartment, but then Vikki had her boys...and my Mom died," she emphasized the irony of that. That while two people had moved in, one had moved out, or on anyway.
"What was the biggest number of people you had living there at one time?" I asked.
"Oh...I think we had....eight, maybe nine people there. Too many." she had again emphasized the irony. "In a two and a half bedroom apartment. Sometimes I just can't believe what people do to themselves."
There were photos of most of her grandchildren. The first few anyway. When the time was getting slow I stared at the photos, so often they became quite friendly to me. There were Jarred and Jerry, Vikki's twin boys, posing in front of a blue background. They had thin faces that slightly resembled their mothers. "They're good boys...most of the time," was the extent of what I learned about them. One was a used car salesman, the other a mechanic at the same auto dealership. "Jared’s girlfriend lives with them, but I don't like her at all," Florence had told me. "She's just...not good. I just don't like her." There was Sheri's oldest daughter's high school portrait. In the corner was a smaller, touched up photo, of her holding her daughter. There was a picture of Sheri and Vikki, taken at the same place as Jarred and Jerry's photos, with the same blue background. In Vikki's photo was a black and white picture of the girls..."That's when Sheri was eight and Vikki was seven," she told me. "Sheri was always really quiet...just like now. She never had very many friends. Vikki was more popular in high school because she was so pretty. But Sheri never really had that. I've always thought that's why she's like she is. I wish she wasn't."

I was never a big drug user through college and after. At my highest use I smoked marijuana three or four times a week. Usually once a week, for most of my post-college life. I dabbled in cocaine, and loved it. Tried ecstasy a couple times. Also liked crystal meth. But none of it became routine, none of it habitual.
Sometimes in my 20s I got a hold of a vicotin prescription and had some 100 pills at my disposal. This was the beginning of what I affectionately called the S.G.V.; Sushi, Guinness and Vicotin, a routine I indulged in every weekend or so while living in Oakland, California.
Florence kept her pills in a daily/weekly container, next to her remote control, usually on the arm of her recliner, or on top of a small chest of drawers on the floor. It was a cheap, faux-mahogany outfit, made to look like something Louis XV might have had; if he had been 2 feet tall. The kind of free gift one gets for subscribing to Time Magazine's "Great Novels of all Time."
Florence had to take at least three cycles of pills each day, usually between 5 and 10 each time. I couldn't tell you what they all were...I suppose some were for blood pressure, some for pain, and I knew she took Prozac.
When I'd first got the caretaking job I worked for a 63-year-old woman, who was taking so many prescribed medications a state organization had been alerted and had sent someone to her home to try and sift through all the different pills.
I was there when the woman came over. It was my first day on the job, and the patient wanted nothing to do with me. Her husband had recently died, and she was well on her way to dying herself, which she did days later.
But the pill organizer, if that's what her job indeed was, was astonished to see the woman, Ida, had been prescribed some 30 medications, by some 7 doctors. Many of the prescriptions were treating the same ailment.
"This sort of thing is killing people," she told me.
The woman was German and I had recently been to Germany. I nodded my head.
"Isn't there a way doctor's can see what others have been prescribing?"
"Not really. Unless all the drugs are coming through one company, which they don't usually."
When the Pain Doctor started prescribing Florence to take eight oxycontin pills a day, I saw an opening.
I knew it was a pain pill, perhaps something like vicotin, and I knew Florence had so many she wasn't going to miss it if I took one.
It was June, and soon the first 80 degree days of summer would give way to 100 degree days in Livermore. Florence had bought me lunch at Safeway, where we dropped off and picked up her medications. I hated the people that worked there. There was a mood of animosity, I assume perpetrated by one of the superiors. They all hated their jobs, and dealing with sick and old people all day probably didn't help. What's more, they were all fat married woman, and their boss was a young bastard, probably a medical student dropout who had somehow ended up at the Livermore Safeway.
If we were just getting pills and sandwiches, Florence stayed in the car for simplicity's sake. I'd lower the window a bit, so she could get some fresh air during the 5 or 10 minutes I was in the store. It was much simpler this way, to the point where if Florence did want to come inside, it was a burden to me because it meant I had to pull the wheelchair out of the car and get her into it, simply so she could stare at the cheese or fruit.
Most of the people at the sandwich counter were jerks too. Totally dehumanized, the 20 of them working in the Deli scrambled around, scooping fried chicken and chow mien into a bag for some fat bitch that had to be back in her cubicle by 12:35 pm.
Occasionally an immigrant would get a hold on one of these jobs and would actually take the employee manual seriously, being careful to say "have a wonderful day!" or "enjoy your lunch!" and maintaining a generally cheery atmosphere in direct opposition to the outright misery the area conveyed.
I'd decided, at some point between the pharmacy and the sandwich counter that day that I was going to try one of Florence's oxycontins. The bottle I'd just gotten had about 250 pills in it, and I knew she had several other prescriptions at home.
I thought getting a hold of one of the pills might be a problem. But once we got home Florence was off to the bathroom so it was as simple as opening the bottle and taking one out. I put it in the back pocket of my jeans, which would become my own personal pillbox for...well, forever.
I finished my sandwich and we watched the A's game throughout the afternoon. Once my stomach was full, I took the pill. I felt a little fuzzy, but nothing extreme. My shift ended at two, I told Florence goodbye and that I'd see her Monday.
Driving home on the vicious 580 freeway I the fuzziness gave way to slight dizziness. My the time I got home I had to run up the stairs to get into the bathroom to avoid throwing up on the carpet.
I've heard stories about people throwing up immediately after doing heroin. I thought of that as I was throwing up in the toilet, and I thought about it more as the day went on, because I felt wonderful. I turned on the television and lay on the floor in ecstasy.
The game was just ending, the A's had won, and I didn't notice. There was some white noise in the background, and I just stared at the vaulted ceiling in my sister's apartment. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise into the white nothingness.
Quite simply I felt like a Jacuzzi had been installed inside my body. I wonderful, bubbling, temperate Jacuzzi that was would last for 4 or 5 hours. I sat there feeling like my life had suddenly achieved some focus.

Florence had so many doctors could remember them not so by their character, their location in Livermore, nor the offices themselves. They addressed parts of the body, though that often overlapped. Some of them prescribed the same drugs, at differing times, depending on what part of the body was having problems on which day.
Florence and I went to the doctor nearly every day I saw her, and often we went twice in one day. Occasionally three times.
I myself hadn't spent much time in the doctor's office since I was young. I stopped going to the doctor when I had gained more power in deciding whether to go to school or not. And after graduated college I infrequently had health insurance. My new job, taking care of Florence, was through the state, so I would eventually get good benefits, through not for several months.
There was one doctor, who we saw most often, a cute little Indian guy who wore shoe lifts and still stood about 5 ft. 3. He was primarily concerned with Florence's back, though he seemed to have some kind of neurological bent to his work. He always listened carefully to Florence's complaints. He'd just stand there, with me sitting there too, saying: "Yes, yes, I know, I know."
I was always a bit skeptical of doctors, and especially Florence's. Her health care was courtesy her husband, who had fought in World War II. The buildings the doctors worked in were like old 1970 cop show sets. Drab, that is; brown paint with another shade of brown trim, trimmed bushes that looked like perfect green squares, outdated shingles. That might have just been Livermore, which seemed to have had an explosion of building during the early 1900s, the 1970s, and a smattering of post-millennium projects.
"I know Florence, you are...getting older."
She liked his frankness, and never hesitated to engage in his playful understatedness. "Yeah, I guess I am. Never though it'd happen to me."
There was no doubt in my mind that, though she was joking, Florence did feel that way. It was early on in these doctor's office visits where I started to understand that age isn't something that happens in blocks or stages...it simply happens, and when it does the only way to truly recognize it is by the toll it takes on the body. Like a garden that slowly erodes, one can accelerate or hasten it by taking various measures, but really, it slowly unfolds and overwhelms unbeknownst to the brain and vaguely recognizable to the mirror in the bathroom.
The first time we visited Florence's "pain specialist" we waited for over one hour before going into the office. Once inside the patient room we waited another 30 minutes before the doctor came in. This routine was repeated every time we came to see the pain specialist. This fact, combined with Florence's eagerness to get out of the apartment and go to appointments 10 or 15 minutes early, led to entire afternoons being spent at the pain specialist's office.
The pain specialist was a bitch. She, as opposed to the Indian doctor, had very little time for Florence, despite having only 3 rooms in her office and being constantly late at that.
The walls of her office were filled with the latest anatomy cards, calendars, clocks, post its and any other noun that could be rationalized into being put into a doctor's office with a pharmaceutical logo slapped across the surface.
A pain specialist’s job, as far as I could see, was to listen to Florence talk about her pain, and then prescribe pain pills accordingly. Initially it was the introduction to Oxycontinin, which at the time was relatively new. It was time released and so one pill could last about 8 hours.
The pain specialist had a haggard look to her. She was about 40, and looked like she was either a mother or an alcoholic. That's to say she was haggard. Not happy, her hair looked over-treated, but abandoned nonetheless.
She was also a bitch. She had very little information for Florence outside of prescribing her more and more oxycontinin. At one point she prescribed her to take 8 every day. Of course, this was how I made my foray into the drug too.
"Don't you have anything besides oxycontin?" I finally blurted out during one appointment.
Now, by the time I said this game had considerably changed. I won't go into detail at the moment. It will reveal itself. I had my own reasons for wanting Florence to switch pain medications. I had dual reasons.
Since we'd seen the pain specialist, the previous month had come to be kind of a mess.

Behind Florence's parking lot was a middle school run by a local church. At times the children at play could sound like a pack of dogs. The sound rushed from end to end; sometimes closer, if they were using the baseball field. Only during the summer, when the school was given to church camps, did the noise lessen. In the Fall, with the start of the school year, their shrieks pierced through the eycaliptus trees that seperated the school from the apartments. The children played all during the winter, albeit on the asphalt, further away from the apartments. But with the rites of spring, the chilly air gave to warmth once again, the eucalyptus shook, and cries became louder, day by day, until the school year ended in June.
It was a long time before the asphalt in the parking lot was replaced. When I would return from an errand into town with Florence I would pull up to the curb, next to a fire hyrant, so we'd have a straight shot to her apartment.
By the end of it all I got pretty good at yanking her wheelchair in and out of the back of my 94 Honda Accord. If I gripped the chair by the top handle and the wheel, I could eaisly jerk it into the air, using its weight to arc into the air, twisting my back at just the right moment, so that the chair would carry itself onto the asphalt, landing with a minimal thud on the wheel itself. Had Florence ever heard or seen this she might not have liked it. Her chair was expensive, and the was only alloted one per several years. But the chair would spring open and I'd wheel it onto the red curb, open the passenger side door, and help Florence int the chair.
But sometimes that winter the emergency curb was deemed unfit for passenger dropoff due to its proximity to the fire hydrant. In order to prevent people from dropping passengers off the curb was painted yellow, which of course confused people into thinking the curb was specifically for dropping passengers off. But finally it was painted red.
I tried to persuede Florence to allow me to continue using the curb. It was so much closer and easier to do so, even if I had to come back out to the car in 100 degree heat, and move it under the eycalyptus trees. But no, Florence would be part of breaking the rules. I resented her for this at times. Parking under the trees meant I had get the chair out of the car, put Florence into it, wheel her 50 feet to the curb, help her out of the chair, steady her, make sure her oxygen tube was clear of the wheel, hope she wouldn't fall down and die, lift the chair onto the curb, sit her back into it and then wheel her back into her apartment. That said, objects necesitate circumnavigation and one day, one of us noticed a ramp not far from where I'd park my car and we started using that.
Florence was hardly heavy, she lost weight continuously and rarely ate more than one or two meals in a day. Pushing her in the chair was never what I would call strenuous, unless we mangaged to find an incline. The stores we freqented (Walmart and Safeway) had motorized carts, which Florence liked to use if the option presented itself. For some reason I didn't like this, because it meant that rather than actively pushing her around a store, I had to follow her around with a cart. Her electric propeller would stop and start, clicking each time and like a dog I listened for these various noises while scanning the store for whatever colors or women that caught my eye.
Florence liked the activity of shopping more than the shopping itself. At some point her psychologist, I'm sure, encouraged her to carry out everyday activities as if she were able bodied and minded.
I could imagine Florence in her heyday, strolling up and down the streets of Livermore on a Saturday afternoon, perusing the boutiques, butchers, and craft stores. Not buying much, but occasionally buying.
I could see this, as we walked through Walmart, and I wanted to encourage her, as we sifted through plastic pots to house new plastic plants. But after an hour at both Walmart and Target, I could get frustrated, and like many husbands, I suppose, started nodding and endorsing whatever product was waved in front of my face.
I'm not sure if Florence liked Walmart or not. We bought things there, but in the times we'd drive through the old downtown of Livermore, where I could picture the old building; the old bank which now housed bar and grill, the Quizno's sandwitches which may have been a hat store, and the wine store that was perhaps a sewing machine repair. I wondered if Florence missed it or if it was just simply gone. If things had changed gradually over the years or if something else had turned the city on its end. Was this depressing to her as it was to me? Or was this just the course of life? The stream that winds and turns down a hill, gathering in a pool at the base, drying up in the summer, but returning in the winter.

When I sat down at my friend Pete’s dinner party I noticed a particularly weasly fellow sitting to my left. I ignored him for most of the meal, trying to entertain my wife, whose English is not perfect. A chubby Australian chump sat to her right, and had surely already offended her when he told us he'd divorced his Korean wife prior to meeting the lanky, film scholar Negress perched at his left. He recommended a winery in my hometown, and at the end of the meal lamented the mediocrity of espressos in America. Apparently the espressos in Australia are something to behold, and apparently that unique breed of South Pacific white trash appreciates said espressos. But why had he ignored the general mediocrity of the meal as a whole? Why hadn’t he condemned the crap faux-Tuscan atmosphere? The ludicrious waitress with the red curly hair? The three slices of salty ham they called proscuitto and sold for $10? Why hadn’t he critiqued the fact that at a table of Descartes and Hegel scholars, at a table of people who give Japanese lesbian authors translated into French (not English) to a birthday boy who doesn’t speak French, a table of former child actors turned film PhD getters, that no one had the guts to step forward and order a bottle of wine when the time came to decide?
I suppose that somewhere within me, there is a wannabe academic. The life of the academic appeals to me, if for nothing else, they’re seemingly important and don’t really work. Probably more accurately, they are clearly self-important and work very hard. The worm sitting to my right in the mediocre Italian restaurant was studying, as I recall, post-Darwinian psychology, or, anyway, how cognitive psychology had evolved post-Order of Species.
My friend Pete? He interviews people who channel, meaning, as a verb; they talk to spirits. Or, spirits talk through them. He’s spent countless hours talking to people who do this. He interviewed one guy in South Florida who claimed to be a Dolphin named Sea Spray. His message was: “BE HAPPY AND FREE.” I’d like to think Pete was happy, but I’m not sure. On the outside he was effervescent, decisive, and present…in the most neo-Buddhist sense of that word. He was bald, perfectly, and had a gigantic Croatian cranium. But in his darker moments he has revealed himself as calculatingly aloof, and once ranted at a coffee shop for 30 minutes about how he had asked and answered life’s existential questions, how could his mother not allow him to save face by offering to fly him out to Indianapolis to see his ailing father? He analyzed things without censoring himself and is surely convinced he is one of Nietzche's supermen. What a bitch to be in a relationship, where pure logic rarely prevails, with Pete, or quite possibly anyone sitting at that table that night. A pacifist to the extreme, I can’t help buy think the woman who finds herself in a relationship with Pete would feel mentally inadequate, small, and might prefer to be abused physically by brainless brute in a white tanktop than to be intellectually eaten alive by Pete.
And live eating was precisely on the menu at the shitty Italian joint in a freshly gentrified section of Oakland.
No one was talking to the worm on my left. He remarked that he was precisely in the middle of the table, and was caught between two conversations. “Two vortexes,” I said. “Two galaxies!" He corrected me. Two galaxies in…” he trailed off into some sort of vocabularic diarrhea that I can’t recall now. His obvious attempt to better what was my remark me wasn’t as annoying as it was alarming. Why would someone who is obviously being left out of the conversation for a precise reason attempt so directly portray himself as a victim of the situation, yet alienate the one person taking pity on him by playing a pithy game of one-upmanship? And perhaps more importantly for my stake in this, why the hell didn’t I turn back towards my companion and continue to ignore the chump?
Bored in general with the entire situation I engaged the fuck, much to my chagrin. “Are you an academic?” I said, foolishly admitting to the understood parameters of the situation by calling him by his preferred species name. “Yes,” he said, sheering down his thoughts into a concise, definite affirmation. It would be the single simplified thought that would slip from between his lips for the rest of the night, and the rest of his life as far as I was concerned.
I followed with the next obvious question, inquiring as to what subject he had sacrificed his social grace to. What theory, what errant claim to history, and what sad lifelong attempt at permanence had he devoted his entire value to anyone to?
At this point there was no understanding him. He was propelled into a flight of fancy where he and he alone, could masturbate in the outer reaches of galaxies that only he had discovered. More to the point he was clearly trying to alienate me, a social masochist of the highest order, he sought to enlighten himself and feel included in something by excluding me. And it worked, to some degree. I wanted nothing to do with him and asked no questions when he’d finished his plea. I simply stared through his black rimmed glasses into the eyes of a man lost in his own time, certifying that I had paid my due and given him his full airtime, and slowly turned back to my mediocre Italian meal in gentrified Oakland, just as my companion had done long before, finished the meal, plopped down my $100, and left.