2023-05-12 - 12:06 p.m.
Met some good friends at a little venue over top a bar. An acquaintance had organized a Björk cover show there. Ran into a long-ago friend who was out celebrating one year since his heart attack and triple-bypass surgery. I asked him: do they still go through the ribcage for that? And he said: they sawed my sternum in half. He was elated to be out.
When I was in my mid 20s, this friend ran a model-making shop for an architecture firm downtown. Every year, sometime in the summer, his company went out to Las Vegas for a huge sales convention thing, and every spring, he needed dozens and dozens of sets of hands to help him finish these four or five pool table-size models of these buildings his company had designed and were now in competition with other designs in order to be built. The buildings themselves were nothing special. Suburban strip mall kinds of things: drugstore and hair salon and yoga studio on the ground floor, two floors of doctors' offices above that, three floors of apartments on top. I was just a strictly no-talent body there to cut out windows from facades after my regular job, from six at night until balcony beers at one or two in the morning. I was there to make a little extra money before I went off to be poor for three years at grad school.
But, still, these models were elaborate enough. They were wired to the gills. The buildings lit up from the inside (don't want to show a quiet building at a sales conference). There were working traffic lights, cars with working headlights, streetlamps. I remember that one of these streetlamps at 1:50 scale or whatever was like $15, and there'd be dozens of just those. I did a lot of cutting out of windows, a lot of hot gluing. I learned how to solder. This guy in charge, this friend who I ran into last night, he was a sweet dude. He always ordered us dinner on the company card: Indian takeout, late-night diner food, beers. He was even nice to me when I'd signed up for a weekend shift but slept in until noon one Sunday. I was 24.
So, last night, he's telling us about his drive into work, how he knows something's wrong, how he drives himself directly to the hospital. How when he wakes up, after surgery, he thinks to himself: I'm alive, it worked, I get a second chance at all this, how none of it was a given, how easily that going-under in the operating room could have been, just, it, it all, everything there ever was going to be for him. And how, when he came to, he couldn't see for a bit, couldn't hear, couldn't move, really, except for one hand. How he thought he was gagging to death, how he tried to spell out the word "gag" on top of the hospital sheet. And then how he finally was able to hear a little bit, and the first thing he heard in this new life was one of the hospital staff saying to another: "I didn't know. I never saw a picture of her when she was pregnant. I didn't know it was even her child."
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