Tuesday morning, talking to Charlie on the couch, I coughed and heard a rib pop. It was on my left side, a rib I’d already managed to bruise severely with repetitive hacking since Christmas. The pain now was interstellar. It was maximum pain the likes of which I’d never known before. I fell to my hands and knees howling, wailing.
“It hurts so fucking much!” I bellowed.
Poor Charlie. Poor Blake in the other room. They were scared and rightfully so. Kids don’t see their parents as vulnerable. They don’t view their mom or dad as susceptible to the kinds of things that can knock other people to the ground. Up until a certain age kids look at their parents as indestructible overseers. They see them as superheroes even if they’re assholes.
I whimpered and headed up to my room.
“Please take care of the boys” I murmured to Blake on the way up the steps. “And please check on me later if you remember.”
I don’t recollect getting to my room, to my bed.
There was a Rambo knife plunged into my cage.
The last time I can remember being this sick I was just a teenager in high school. I laid in bed in an endless fever dream/ coughing for weeks/ until the day came when I had to decide whether or not to climb out of bed, limp downstairs, walk out into the dank winter morning, and get into a car full of my friends (all drinking and smoking weed) for a my very first trip to New York City.
To see Uncle Tupelo playing at CBGB’s.
It was the beginning of the Still Feel Gone tour.
So, yeah.
I went.
We rose to the top of the Empire State Building and I felt so weak and small and Tiny Tim. The air was so foggy and murky that you could only see maybe three blocks out in any direction. It was so strange, being atop a building I had dreamed of climbing someday only to find myself robbed of all views but the straight down one.
Outside CBGB’s we talked to the band. They invited us into their van where it was warm. I don’t remember much of the conversation. I’m sure we were stoned and maybe they were too. It was a nasty winter’s evening in Manhattan. I barely recall that there was a paperback copy of a recent Daniel Boone biography on the van’s dashboard. I asked the band who was reading that and I don’t remember who said they were. Is that strange? I can remember my question but not the response.
Inside the legendary club it was dark and foreign and there wasn’t many people there. No one really knew of the band yet. My friends and I sat at a table a few feet from the stage. I wasn’t 21 yet but the waitress wanted me to buy a drink if I was going to sit there so I ordered a Jack Daniel’s. It cost a lot of money, I thought. I didn’t even want to drink it. I did though.
Uncle Tupelo were sublime. I was somewhat drunk/ out of my mind sick/ enraptured by my own twisted youth/ by these songs I knew by heart. I don’t expect that this illness I’m living through right now will end with a similar story. That’s alright. One story like this per lifetime is fine by me.
The last three weeks have left me bewildered, a little stunned. From the early stages of flu-like symptoms on Christmas weekend to the urgent care pseudo-doctor’s bronchitis diagnosis 10 days later, I struggled — long and hard — with the bizarre consciousness of illness.
Here and there I forced myself to go to work. Mostly because staying in bed means no pay for the hourly Craigslist gig worker like me. But also because there were times when I felt better. Times when I had a bit more energy and spunk and felt like: I can do this. I can bring myself back.
But then, as the day dragged on, I’d find myself trying to catch my breath/ wheezing like an old person/ sitting down to recover like a sick person. In my mind, I am still young/ on stage/ covered in sweat/ able to go and go and go on the strength of my own reserves/ my own desires/ my own insatiable lust for being someone/ making something of myself/ proving my worth/ winning the night with the praise from a few of the crowd of people/ 52 paid/ who might venture over to me to say a nice thing or two.
In truth though, I’m not that person anymore. I’m a lot older. I’m overweight. I quit smoking but I smoked a lot. I drink wine. I don’t eat healthy. I’m stressed out by a slew of things from unpaid bills to all these kids to custody fights and at times I seriously have thought about just laying back and leaving. About giving up.
I’ve written about that feeling before too. A few times. You know why? Because it’s a real feeling. Lying in bed the past few weeks, the darkness of winter closed in all around the house even in the middle of the day, coughing so hard that at times my breath seemed to just pause itself and allow me to rise above everything/ an out-of-body experience in which, unable to draw oxygen, my brain lifted me aloft so I could just lay there suspended above my own visage down on the bed/ my face drowning in the gush of a river that runs right through my skull with the blast of a point blank harpoon to the eyeball.
It was then that I could really see myself for what I had seemingly become. A feeble, tricked man who keeps believing that he is living this great life of art and love but who is, in fact, actually being torn apart by the raging winds of time. Like some dilapidated shack out on the old forgotten prairies. One afternoon, the gale comes out of nowhere and slams into your boarded up sides and all of you just gives at once. The crashing sound of your final undoing goes unheard even by you. Everything is silenced by the white bawling/ hidden by the transitioning walls of powdery dust. A mere mortal like me doesn’t stand a chance.
So what’s more poignant?
The natural course of you being torn apart by the incessant whims of time?
Or the voluntarily stepping down off the stage when you don’t need any of that shit anymore?
Big coughing means big thinking, apparently. Laying on the bed, jittery from all the meds and afraid of coughing even one more time now because each one makes the newly battered rib injury flare up with the flames of hellfire, I move in and out of thoughts, both sensible and nonsensical.
You might fantasize that time off to simply lay around and recover sounds damn good to you, being that you are a go-getter/ always hustling/ always shuttling the kids and working on that thing for your boss on your laptop on the kitchen island. You you you: always working on a new pitch, a new way in to the non-profit’s heart. Say it this way. Explain it that way, with real feeling, with real soul. And who knows? Maybe all of that has in fact brought you to this point where- should you be struck down with a sickness that immobilizes you for some stretch of time well beyond the emergency two days you always tell yourself would be your limit, no matter what- you could most certainly simply lie there on your nice comforter or your nice afghan or whatever the fuck and you could just get all of the coughing out of the way and read a couple books and catch up on some emails and blah, blah, blah until you wake up in two days time/ sip the fresh coffee/ sip the fresh OJ/ take a bite of your avocado toast breakfast bar from Trader Joe’s/ and mosey downstairs into the light of your ever-loving family who have been carrying on without you the same as if you’d never even disappeared.
You might suppose that you will follow that trail if you happen to get sick along the way. And for all I know, hell, you just might. But I also know this other thing after these past few weeks of weird sick living. There is an angel hovering just above your melatonin face. And she is the Angel of Death. And after this: if you live: oh man, what’s gonna change?
Tuesday, maybe ten minutes after I somehow got myself back into bed after the cough with Charlie punctured through my rib muscle, the doorknob started turning.
Someone was entering the room.
I was conscious but in a bit of a daze. Between the pain and the fear of more pain, I was trying to figure out the reality of my situation. Was I needing to go to the doctor again? Was I needing to go to the hospital? Was this a thing that would heal itself or was this something that would require a team of experts to touch my side/ stethoscope my lungs/ look in my ears/ and tell me that there isn’t much they can do except prescribe this or that to help with the swelling and the fact that they know that I’m lying so I can get my hands on some oxy.
The door swung open then and it was Blake. My oldest. They turn 15 this weekend. Jesus H. Christ. They had an old whiskey glass in their one hand and they were walking real steady/ holding that glass in a place of hard-earned balance since it was filled, nearly to the brim, with what looked like water.
I only stared at them, unable to say anything.
Blake rarely shows up in me and Arle’s room. They are a loner, driven by their own inner dialogues and their own sense of progress that differ quite wildly from the ones that the rest of the world toils at in it’s semi-pathetic low frequency monumental blue obscurity.
I smiled a little.
“What’s that you got there?,” I asked as they approached the bed, their eyes ultra focused on the glass in their hand.
“It’s water for you,” they responded, a little pep in their words. A little lift in their own realization that they had stepped hard outside of their comfort zone in order to follow through on a whimsical ask I had tossed at them in a moment of pain not long ago.
Remember?
“Please take care of the boys,” I had murmured to Blake on the way up the steps. “And please check on me later if you remember.”
Here they were then, checking on me. With a glass of water.
I began to weep.
But I held it in and that caused my voice box to heave a bale of hairy hay down into the void of my chest cavity. And that made me have to cough/ the slow creeping feeling of a rising tickle that would most certainly need to be freed from my frightened body before it packed on more pressure and demanded even more absolute brute force to exorcise it from my space in the same way that you would expect to exorcise a hateful vengeful demon from your sad little neck.
Somewhere in all of that, Blake saw that I was struggling with something. Whether they recognized the absurd scrunching of my chin into my chest in order to try and stem the tide of the hairy hay, or whether they could tell that I was either in pain or about to be in pain, I do not know for sure.
But I do know that as I was caught there in that moment without words or the ability to even speak them, I felt Blake’s left hand landing gently on my left knee. It was all so unplanned, a spontaneous act of concern or maybe even love, from a kid who practically never ever goes to that place. Not because they don’t feel it, you tell yourself after a time, but rather because they are probably feeling everything way too much. Intense waves of love or feeling or concern or fear that evolve up out of the atypical mind are processed and dealt with much differently than most of us can recognize without a lot of patient watching and learning across many, many years. Maybe even across a lifetime and then some.
Blake’s eyes were warm, inquisitive and steady as they met my gaze and allowed their palm to rest on my knee for what feels like forever to me now.
I smiled/ fought back the cough.
But it came anyway: a shotgun blast of scorched field hay and flecks of fulminating lung and rising tornados of horse hair plaster dust like a ghost pouring out of my wide-open mouth, and with it, the pain.
A crashing of baseball bats across the backside of my ribs from one end clear across to the other.
I screeched loudly, my eyes now being overrun with tears for the second time in a minute, this time for entirely different reasons.
“MotherFUCKKKKKKER!” I screamed! “Oh my god it fucking hurts so much!”
I couldn’t control myself. There was no being aware of a kid’s presence or mindful of the fear it might strike in them, me launching myself at their vulnerable walls like that. I was out of my head, withdrawn from my own mind.
When I finally landed, I landed on a longish churned-up stretch of dug up ground. It was soft and weak underneath my legs. I was in my bed but I was also other places, you know? I was on the floor of a woods just lying there alone. I was curled up in a boxcar and I was freezing to death. I was standing in line for fucking porridge. I was in a garden, and it was warm and sunny, but I had no arms or legs like a slug.
“Thank you, Blake,” I mumbled from underneath my rubble.
Their hand was still touching me. They looked deep into my eyes and I could see the sweet light of everything all at once. They squeezed their fingers on my knee but it was so light; it was barely noticeable. Then they turned and walked out of the bedroom without a word.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
