STAB
from the website word -- written/ published around 1997
June 23, 1993, about 1:45 AMBetween Bushwick and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in front of my apartment. Digging into my shorts so long for the phone number, I don't even notice them coming until it's too late. They're wearing hoods and it's summer. They're crossing the street right towards me and I think they're running. Looks like an assault situation to me. Two teenagers are upon me before I know what's going on: a short one in my face, a larger one behind (maybe they wouldn't have seemed to move so quickly if I hadn't just snorted that dime bag?)
I am standing right in front of my apartment, keys in hand, but I don't get to the doorknob quickly enough. I was just about to use the pay phone (my own having been shut off) to call an editor for an extension on an article I'd been trying to write. The investment reporter gig I've just started has me spooked. I can't get things done and don't know what I'm doing. I'm extremely unhappy there. I'm snorting at least a bag each of heroin and cocaine, dailyoften right in the work bathroom, in the World Trade Center.
But back to my assailants: they want money. Sorry, I don't have any. I almost think to tell them of the twenty on top of the fridge inside my apartment, but that would mean letting them in, which doesn't seem very smart. The short kid in front does all the talking. What's that in his hand, is it really anything?
I think about kneeing him in the balls, but I don't know what kind of weapon he or the kid behind me has. Is that really a knife in his hand? Besides, who am I fooling? I'm not a fighter. I've never been in a fight in my entire life. They just want my money, these guys. Kid in front of me can't be older than eighteen. Hispanic accent.
The short guy just cannot believe I have no money. I give him my pocket change. He doesn't even take itcoins thrown to the ground, shining in the streetlight. "WHERE IS YOUR MONEY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER," he whispers in my ear. I wonder if he has me confused with somebody else.
I have been mugged twice before, but it was different somehow. This is super weird. The threat of violence hangs heavy, this kid is sweating, I know that sweat, he needs his drugs. I almost feel sorry for him, the way he's shaking. I am afraid to make a sound, that if I yell out, I will be beaten with a lead pipe or something by the large guy behind me, or he could have a gun. This feels serious, I could be shot with a gun. Or knifed.
I am more afraid that if I yell out, no one will hear me, or no one will care. This street gets so deserted at night. It's a neighborhood of working people, families. Nobody else seems to be awake. Some cars drive by slowly, the people inside don't notice or don't care or worse. The big guy rummages through my back pockets, even shoves his hands in my socks. "He don't have no money, man," I think I hear the shadow kid say. Or maybe I add that to memory later?
It doesn't matter. In just a few moments, my assailants disappear entirely from sight and sound. But first, a glint of silver, and a microsecond, freeze-framed glimpse of my attackeran anonymous, rageful face burned into my headthen they are gone. I will always wonder about that look on the short kid's face as his arm blurred so quickly toward my chest, as he thrust the knife into my ribcage, then pulled it out and did it again. The image is hazy: slightly fleshy, plastic baby-cheeks contorted into an inexplicable hate rage. The particulars are lost to me as anything but a symbol. Later, I'm unable to give the police a decent description. And I'll never go down and look at pictures, it freaks me out too much.
You know how they say that when you're about to possibly die, your whole life flashes before you? That didn't happen to me. All I saw was one part of my life, and a pretty strange, seemingly insignificant part at that. My memory was of a Thanksgiving or maybe Christmas turkey that had been laying out on the counter in my folks' house. It hadn't been cooked yet; this would have been '75 or '76, when we lived in Cleveland.
The turkey had not yet been put into the oven, it was thawing out. I grabbed a knife beside it and plunged it several times into the raw flesh, the knife entering the dead bird between its bones. My first thought, right after getting stabbed, the knife thunking against my ribs, is "Now I know how that turkey felt."
Next thing, I look down at my chest, and my friend has left something behind: his knife! It's sticking right out of me, very horror flick. It's a plastic-handled meat-cutting knife, the kind with a serrated edge and a grip molded to fit your handthe kind you cut your chicken-fried steak with at a greasy spoon. I think, "Shit, why'd he have to use that? Couldn't the guy at least have used a more expensive knife?" Pulling it out, I hear the sound like when you're eating spaghetti: a gloopy, wet, gurgling sort of noise. Only then do I realize I've been stabbed, it appears, right in the heart. Right in the heart, right in the heart.
I pick up the phone. If you're gonna be stabbed, it's good to have it happen in front of a phone. I dial 911. Hello, I've been stabbed, I say into the receiver. It's like ordering a pizzawhere are you? I give the operator the address on Montrose Avenue, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It's my own address, I have no trouble remembering it. She tries to get me to stay on the phone, but I don't feel like standing there talking to this person, so I drop the phone and let it dangle on its line. I don't want to hang up on her, that would be rude.
At this point, I look down and see a lot of blood on the cement. I'm squirting the stuff fairly dramatically out of my chest in a rhythmic fashion. Like in a Monty Python skit, I think to myself. Crimson liquid is dripping down the length of my arm, as well. Luckily, the red color doesn't show well through my soaking wet, solid black T-shirt. That cuts down on the shock of obviously losing so much bloodwhich is cool, because I wind up losing a lot.
I never, ever think, "I am going to die." I know this is a serious thing going on, but it doesn't hurt much, I hardly feel a thing (that would more than be made up for soon enough). I get the key in the front door and enter the building. I go up the stairs and feed my cat, because I know I'll be gone for a little while. (Before you start thinking I'm a saint, this is the same kitty that mere months later I will abandon, with no food or water, when I've made myself a debased slave to dope).
I lie down on my old futon for a minute or so, noticing the strange noises coming from my chest, and it gets kinda hard to breathe. The lights from outside start to dim, and I figure lying down is probably not the best thing to do. I know that if I go to sleep, I might not wake up. So I get up, lock the door, walk down the stairs and go back out front. I'm a bit distressed to see that the cops aren't even here yet. It's been at least ten minutes, and the police station is two blocks away.
I bang on the door of my neighbors below me, a couple I'm friendly with, and ask them why the fuck the ambulance isn't here yet. The look of horror on the neighbor's face is acute, and weird. It's hard to connect it with what is happening to me, but I know her screaming is about me, and that bums me out. I wish she'd settle down. There's more blood than before in the hallwayis that all from me?
Finally, the cops and ambulance arrive at the same time, and I'm stuck on a gurney and lifted into the back of the ambulance. The cops ask me who did it, and I'm really out of it by now. I start telling them how it started out just like the other time I was mugged, only different, because this time I've been stabbed, and they say who did this to you guy, and I say two kids, they're not here anymore. I'm sure they're nowhere to be found, and they're not. (The police I later deal with are very friendly and understanding and want to help, but I'm too afraid of facing my attackers to come forward. I'm increasingly frightened that they'll come get me and kill me because I have the ability to convict them of attempted murder or aggravated assault or whatever).
For some reason, I feel the need to make it appear as if I'm feeling really together, so I crack jokes. While the ambulance races me towards the Williamsburg bridge over Brooklyn's severely ill-paved back streets, I am bouncing all over the back of the car, and as the guy in the back is trying to stick me in the arm with an IV, I joke about the condition of the roads in Williamsburg. And I remember to tell them I've used drugs tonight, knowing it will affect how much and what kind of drugs they can give me.
From here on, I have little idea of time span, or what tests are done exactly, or anything. A trauma specialist, assuming I'm unconscious, turns to his coworker and says, "The other day an older guy came in with the same thing and he died." I tell him, right there, that I don't think it's very cool to say that in front of me. I'm going to live, and that's not very nice. I can't see his expression through the plastic sheet pulled over my head.
The nurses make an x-ray and learn that my heart was missed by millimeters and my left lung is filling up with blood really fast. Several people hold me down as a two inch slit is made in my left side and a huge plastic tube shoved directly into my lungs. Several doctors later inform me that this kind of collapsed-lung surgery is the most painful procedure you can undergo, and I certainly believe them. There are very many nerves in your lungs, did you know that? I find that out. I seem to feel every single one of them. I'm screaming so loud, I think my throat will burst. They drain out what looks to be a large, 2- gallon Tropicana-sized jug of my own blood. I would rather drown in it than feel this pain, but it does end, and I slip into some sort of sleep.
I'm woken up to be informed that "We're going to cut you open, have a look around, and sew you back up." Sounds fine to me. "You're gonna knock me out this time, right?" I ask seriously. They laugh. Some people are already here, in the hospital: my estranged father is excellently in from Connecticut; my too-forgiving Jersey landlord is here, pulled away from his own birthday party; my ex-girlfriend and future caretaker of the cat is here too. She's called everyone. My friends all look at me with that weird look, I tell them to cut it out. I try and make them laugh but it doesn't work on them any more than it does on the attendants.
As I'm placed on the operating table, it falls apart and collapses under me, but nothing breaks and I'm okay. "Just so long as that doesn't happen during the surgery," I mumble to myself. The nurse next to me winces upon hearing it. The wonderful surgeon, a famous heart specialist (but I've lost the book I wrote his name in) does a terrific job on me. It's mostly exploratory heart-and-lung surgery, they crack open the ribs and spread them and sew up the leaking artery and lung-stuff and then stick big Frankenstein staples in my chest.
They take very good care of me, keeping me in Intensive Care the majority of my stay. My mom flies up to be alongside the bed, she's there as soon as I open my eyes. Friends and friends show up and they all say I love you. It is one of the highlights of my life.
Just ten days after being admitted, I'm released. They smartly do not give me any pain pills except a few aspirins with codeine. Trying to carry the bags of shit people have brought from the hospital out to the curb, I have to walk slower than slow, nobody offers help. By the time I make it to a cab I am quite sure I'm having a heart attack. But it's just pain from the strain and the healing. I want so badly to be back on that Demerol drip!
The recovery process is very slow. I just want to return to normal things. I want to feel 25, not 85. In my shock-addled universe, the only thing that makes sense is to pretend I've never been stabbed. So I go back to the job I hate, almost right away, even when they offer me disability, which would allow me to recuperate properly at home. But I feel so bad, and I just can't ever make it to work on time, and I get in trouble.
I become depressed like I never have before. I sink into my bed and cannot leave. I finally lose that job. I'm afraid to go outside because there might be more people with knives out there. I know this is crazy, so I don't tell anyone about it. Feeling so bummed out, I go back to what had made me feel okay beforehand. I quickly return to snorting dope, and coke, all the time, until snorting doesn't do it anymore. Soon I'm shooting up speedballs.
This is all I do: search around my apartment for an item left to sellusually a couple of collectible records or books I'd never find again even if I spent years looking for themthen go and sell them to a used book or record shop. I even sell a disc or two that doesn't belong to me. I get the cash, cop what is hopefully the same shit the kid selling to me said it was, go home, and stick it into my arm, all the while avoiding my landlord or the super next door because I've ceased to pay rent, nor do I have electricity and it's middle of winter.
The stabbing was an express train to the Junkie Hotel that I was headed to before all this happened. Everything that happened after I was stabbed would have occurred anyway. The stabbing just accelerated the process. After six months, nothing left to sell, I get kicked out of my place, losing the super-8 films of my family, my photos of friends from my life, artworks from friends and ones I'd made myself, my cassette collection, my discs and books full of writings, everything.
I have frequent, intense hallucinations from shooting up the cocainethe radio is talking to me, everyone is laughing at me, I am always on the verge of getting busted by the cops. I do get busted by the cops, that's no fun, I sleep on the street several nights. That's it, I've finally my hit bottom, where I'll do anything not to live like this anymore.
On May 9, 1994, I go home to my Mom's house, kicking on the Greyhound the whole way, sweating and hallucinating. In Florida, land of drugs, I stop taking any. Not much later, I move to my current home in East Tennessee, to take a job at a friend's non-profit art organization. I still have a long ways to go.
My scars show through a t-shirt in the summertimegreat big gobs of pink tissue that only now, after four years, have begun to fully heal. I should have taken better care of them, my massage therapist wife tells me, I should have rubbed them with vitamin E. But honestly, those scars are something of a source of pride. They're the hardcore evidence of what I've been through. The only thing I have to show for the experience besides that huge wad of debt.
I don't even think about the stabbing much anymore, nor do I speak of it, hardly. Occasionally, the memory will violently return, and not always in a surreal dream. I'll be pricing used CD's, for instance, at my new job, and for no apparent reason I'll remember just what it was like, spurting all that blood in the hallway, or the exact way the knife felt inside my chest.
from the website word -- written/ published around 1997
June 23, 1993, about 1:45 AMBetween Bushwick and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in front of my apartment. Digging into my shorts so long for the phone number, I don't even notice them coming until it's too late. They're wearing hoods and it's summer. They're crossing the street right towards me and I think they're running. Looks like an assault situation to me. Two teenagers are upon me before I know what's going on: a short one in my face, a larger one behind (maybe they wouldn't have seemed to move so quickly if I hadn't just snorted that dime bag?)
I am standing right in front of my apartment, keys in hand, but I don't get to the doorknob quickly enough. I was just about to use the pay phone (my own having been shut off) to call an editor for an extension on an article I'd been trying to write. The investment reporter gig I've just started has me spooked. I can't get things done and don't know what I'm doing. I'm extremely unhappy there. I'm snorting at least a bag each of heroin and cocaine, dailyoften right in the work bathroom, in the World Trade Center.
But back to my assailants: they want money. Sorry, I don't have any. I almost think to tell them of the twenty on top of the fridge inside my apartment, but that would mean letting them in, which doesn't seem very smart. The short kid in front does all the talking. What's that in his hand, is it really anything?
I think about kneeing him in the balls, but I don't know what kind of weapon he or the kid behind me has. Is that really a knife in his hand? Besides, who am I fooling? I'm not a fighter. I've never been in a fight in my entire life. They just want my money, these guys. Kid in front of me can't be older than eighteen. Hispanic accent.
The short guy just cannot believe I have no money. I give him my pocket change. He doesn't even take itcoins thrown to the ground, shining in the streetlight. "WHERE IS YOUR MONEY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER," he whispers in my ear. I wonder if he has me confused with somebody else.
I have been mugged twice before, but it was different somehow. This is super weird. The threat of violence hangs heavy, this kid is sweating, I know that sweat, he needs his drugs. I almost feel sorry for him, the way he's shaking. I am afraid to make a sound, that if I yell out, I will be beaten with a lead pipe or something by the large guy behind me, or he could have a gun. This feels serious, I could be shot with a gun. Or knifed.
I am more afraid that if I yell out, no one will hear me, or no one will care. This street gets so deserted at night. It's a neighborhood of working people, families. Nobody else seems to be awake. Some cars drive by slowly, the people inside don't notice or don't care or worse. The big guy rummages through my back pockets, even shoves his hands in my socks. "He don't have no money, man," I think I hear the shadow kid say. Or maybe I add that to memory later?
It doesn't matter. In just a few moments, my assailants disappear entirely from sight and sound. But first, a glint of silver, and a microsecond, freeze-framed glimpse of my attackeran anonymous, rageful face burned into my headthen they are gone. I will always wonder about that look on the short kid's face as his arm blurred so quickly toward my chest, as he thrust the knife into my ribcage, then pulled it out and did it again. The image is hazy: slightly fleshy, plastic baby-cheeks contorted into an inexplicable hate rage. The particulars are lost to me as anything but a symbol. Later, I'm unable to give the police a decent description. And I'll never go down and look at pictures, it freaks me out too much.
You know how they say that when you're about to possibly die, your whole life flashes before you? That didn't happen to me. All I saw was one part of my life, and a pretty strange, seemingly insignificant part at that. My memory was of a Thanksgiving or maybe Christmas turkey that had been laying out on the counter in my folks' house. It hadn't been cooked yet; this would have been '75 or '76, when we lived in Cleveland.
The turkey had not yet been put into the oven, it was thawing out. I grabbed a knife beside it and plunged it several times into the raw flesh, the knife entering the dead bird between its bones. My first thought, right after getting stabbed, the knife thunking against my ribs, is "Now I know how that turkey felt."
Next thing, I look down at my chest, and my friend has left something behind: his knife! It's sticking right out of me, very horror flick. It's a plastic-handled meat-cutting knife, the kind with a serrated edge and a grip molded to fit your handthe kind you cut your chicken-fried steak with at a greasy spoon. I think, "Shit, why'd he have to use that? Couldn't the guy at least have used a more expensive knife?" Pulling it out, I hear the sound like when you're eating spaghetti: a gloopy, wet, gurgling sort of noise. Only then do I realize I've been stabbed, it appears, right in the heart. Right in the heart, right in the heart.
I pick up the phone. If you're gonna be stabbed, it's good to have it happen in front of a phone. I dial 911. Hello, I've been stabbed, I say into the receiver. It's like ordering a pizzawhere are you? I give the operator the address on Montrose Avenue, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. It's my own address, I have no trouble remembering it. She tries to get me to stay on the phone, but I don't feel like standing there talking to this person, so I drop the phone and let it dangle on its line. I don't want to hang up on her, that would be rude.
At this point, I look down and see a lot of blood on the cement. I'm squirting the stuff fairly dramatically out of my chest in a rhythmic fashion. Like in a Monty Python skit, I think to myself. Crimson liquid is dripping down the length of my arm, as well. Luckily, the red color doesn't show well through my soaking wet, solid black T-shirt. That cuts down on the shock of obviously losing so much bloodwhich is cool, because I wind up losing a lot.
I never, ever think, "I am going to die." I know this is a serious thing going on, but it doesn't hurt much, I hardly feel a thing (that would more than be made up for soon enough). I get the key in the front door and enter the building. I go up the stairs and feed my cat, because I know I'll be gone for a little while. (Before you start thinking I'm a saint, this is the same kitty that mere months later I will abandon, with no food or water, when I've made myself a debased slave to dope).
I lie down on my old futon for a minute or so, noticing the strange noises coming from my chest, and it gets kinda hard to breathe. The lights from outside start to dim, and I figure lying down is probably not the best thing to do. I know that if I go to sleep, I might not wake up. So I get up, lock the door, walk down the stairs and go back out front. I'm a bit distressed to see that the cops aren't even here yet. It's been at least ten minutes, and the police station is two blocks away.
I bang on the door of my neighbors below me, a couple I'm friendly with, and ask them why the fuck the ambulance isn't here yet. The look of horror on the neighbor's face is acute, and weird. It's hard to connect it with what is happening to me, but I know her screaming is about me, and that bums me out. I wish she'd settle down. There's more blood than before in the hallwayis that all from me?
Finally, the cops and ambulance arrive at the same time, and I'm stuck on a gurney and lifted into the back of the ambulance. The cops ask me who did it, and I'm really out of it by now. I start telling them how it started out just like the other time I was mugged, only different, because this time I've been stabbed, and they say who did this to you guy, and I say two kids, they're not here anymore. I'm sure they're nowhere to be found, and they're not. (The police I later deal with are very friendly and understanding and want to help, but I'm too afraid of facing my attackers to come forward. I'm increasingly frightened that they'll come get me and kill me because I have the ability to convict them of attempted murder or aggravated assault or whatever).
For some reason, I feel the need to make it appear as if I'm feeling really together, so I crack jokes. While the ambulance races me towards the Williamsburg bridge over Brooklyn's severely ill-paved back streets, I am bouncing all over the back of the car, and as the guy in the back is trying to stick me in the arm with an IV, I joke about the condition of the roads in Williamsburg. And I remember to tell them I've used drugs tonight, knowing it will affect how much and what kind of drugs they can give me.
From here on, I have little idea of time span, or what tests are done exactly, or anything. A trauma specialist, assuming I'm unconscious, turns to his coworker and says, "The other day an older guy came in with the same thing and he died." I tell him, right there, that I don't think it's very cool to say that in front of me. I'm going to live, and that's not very nice. I can't see his expression through the plastic sheet pulled over my head.
The nurses make an x-ray and learn that my heart was missed by millimeters and my left lung is filling up with blood really fast. Several people hold me down as a two inch slit is made in my left side and a huge plastic tube shoved directly into my lungs. Several doctors later inform me that this kind of collapsed-lung surgery is the most painful procedure you can undergo, and I certainly believe them. There are very many nerves in your lungs, did you know that? I find that out. I seem to feel every single one of them. I'm screaming so loud, I think my throat will burst. They drain out what looks to be a large, 2- gallon Tropicana-sized jug of my own blood. I would rather drown in it than feel this pain, but it does end, and I slip into some sort of sleep.
I'm woken up to be informed that "We're going to cut you open, have a look around, and sew you back up." Sounds fine to me. "You're gonna knock me out this time, right?" I ask seriously. They laugh. Some people are already here, in the hospital: my estranged father is excellently in from Connecticut; my too-forgiving Jersey landlord is here, pulled away from his own birthday party; my ex-girlfriend and future caretaker of the cat is here too. She's called everyone. My friends all look at me with that weird look, I tell them to cut it out. I try and make them laugh but it doesn't work on them any more than it does on the attendants.
As I'm placed on the operating table, it falls apart and collapses under me, but nothing breaks and I'm okay. "Just so long as that doesn't happen during the surgery," I mumble to myself. The nurse next to me winces upon hearing it. The wonderful surgeon, a famous heart specialist (but I've lost the book I wrote his name in) does a terrific job on me. It's mostly exploratory heart-and-lung surgery, they crack open the ribs and spread them and sew up the leaking artery and lung-stuff and then stick big Frankenstein staples in my chest.
They take very good care of me, keeping me in Intensive Care the majority of my stay. My mom flies up to be alongside the bed, she's there as soon as I open my eyes. Friends and friends show up and they all say I love you. It is one of the highlights of my life.
Just ten days after being admitted, I'm released. They smartly do not give me any pain pills except a few aspirins with codeine. Trying to carry the bags of shit people have brought from the hospital out to the curb, I have to walk slower than slow, nobody offers help. By the time I make it to a cab I am quite sure I'm having a heart attack. But it's just pain from the strain and the healing. I want so badly to be back on that Demerol drip!
The recovery process is very slow. I just want to return to normal things. I want to feel 25, not 85. In my shock-addled universe, the only thing that makes sense is to pretend I've never been stabbed. So I go back to the job I hate, almost right away, even when they offer me disability, which would allow me to recuperate properly at home. But I feel so bad, and I just can't ever make it to work on time, and I get in trouble.
I become depressed like I never have before. I sink into my bed and cannot leave. I finally lose that job. I'm afraid to go outside because there might be more people with knives out there. I know this is crazy, so I don't tell anyone about it. Feeling so bummed out, I go back to what had made me feel okay beforehand. I quickly return to snorting dope, and coke, all the time, until snorting doesn't do it anymore. Soon I'm shooting up speedballs.
This is all I do: search around my apartment for an item left to sellusually a couple of collectible records or books I'd never find again even if I spent years looking for themthen go and sell them to a used book or record shop. I even sell a disc or two that doesn't belong to me. I get the cash, cop what is hopefully the same shit the kid selling to me said it was, go home, and stick it into my arm, all the while avoiding my landlord or the super next door because I've ceased to pay rent, nor do I have electricity and it's middle of winter.
The stabbing was an express train to the Junkie Hotel that I was headed to before all this happened. Everything that happened after I was stabbed would have occurred anyway. The stabbing just accelerated the process. After six months, nothing left to sell, I get kicked out of my place, losing the super-8 films of my family, my photos of friends from my life, artworks from friends and ones I'd made myself, my cassette collection, my discs and books full of writings, everything.
I have frequent, intense hallucinations from shooting up the cocainethe radio is talking to me, everyone is laughing at me, I am always on the verge of getting busted by the cops. I do get busted by the cops, that's no fun, I sleep on the street several nights. That's it, I've finally my hit bottom, where I'll do anything not to live like this anymore.
On May 9, 1994, I go home to my Mom's house, kicking on the Greyhound the whole way, sweating and hallucinating. In Florida, land of drugs, I stop taking any. Not much later, I move to my current home in East Tennessee, to take a job at a friend's non-profit art organization. I still have a long ways to go.
My scars show through a t-shirt in the summertimegreat big gobs of pink tissue that only now, after four years, have begun to fully heal. I should have taken better care of them, my massage therapist wife tells me, I should have rubbed them with vitamin E. But honestly, those scars are something of a source of pride. They're the hardcore evidence of what I've been through. The only thing I have to show for the experience besides that huge wad of debt.
I don't even think about the stabbing much anymore, nor do I speak of it, hardly. Occasionally, the memory will violently return, and not always in a surreal dream. I'll be pricing used CD's, for instance, at my new job, and for no apparent reason I'll remember just what it was like, spurting all that blood in the hallway, or the exact way the knife felt inside my chest.
VIEW 14 of 14 COMMENTS
I'm so glad you made it.