Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me some cash:
January 10th. January 10th. That’s the day Dana’s Gynecologist predicted nine months months ago that we’d be having Baby-Cordan. What a putz Dr. Sapperfield is. January 10th!, yeah right!, like he’s going to be able to pull a date out of a hat like that.
Dr. Sapperfool is a cragedy old reptile southern-boy physician who has more hair in his nose than on his head. January 10th!. What an idiot.
Being the omniscient news reporter that I am, I pretty much know all you need to know about Birth. After all, I had just received my diploma with the Lamaze Queen seal of approval on it. Like a punch drunk fighter, she had beaten me senseless with Uteruses, and appesiotomies, and effacement intervals. If you looked any of these technical terms up in the medical encyclopeadia, I expect you’d probably find my face right there in the margin. So to hear Dr. Sapperass say that Baby-Cordan was coming on the 10th, well that just blows my mind.
My last letter to you ended with false labor pains consuming my day to day existence. Unfortunately they went on intermitently for the rest of the holidays. For the most part, I tried to ignore them so I could keep some semblence of my sanity. In fact, the only time I really remember re-concerning myself with potential labor was on
New Years Eve. I was getting tired of waiting for the baby of course, but economics was also a strong motiviating factor.
It was 9 p.m. on December 31st. Dana and I were kicking back in a dark room illuminated by the rythmic glow of the television. Since a major booz-a-thon was pretty much out of the question for Dana, we decided to table any party plans we may have had and just enjoy each other’s sobriety in front of a rented video.
“You know,” I said to Dana during a remarkably slow portion of the film, “You only have about three hours to spring forth life before I loose my automatic tax deduction.”
Dana giggled knowing that I was only being half serious.
“I wish he’d come also A.C., but I don’t think he’ll be here anytime within the next three hours. Sorry.”
“You could always try some more jumping jacks,” I said laughingly.
As you know by now, Dana’s stomach was big. Like a gold fish filled plastic baggie bursting with liquid life. Lamaze Queen told us that the final days of the pregnancy were some of the toughest. She told the maternal mom-to-be’s that they could expect swelling body parts, aching joints and lethargic behavior tainted with wild emotional mood swings straight out of a Friday the 13th movie where Jason and his bloody hatchet paint the town red on a Saturday night. It hadn’t quite gotten to the point that Dana had donned a hockey mask or anything, but she was ready to bring this incubation equation to fruition.
“There’s one minute to go before the New Year, folks. Let the ball begin to drop,” bellowed a chemically preserved, surgically enhanced Dick Clark through my TV screen.
“Dana. Dana. Whatta ya think?, You’ve only got a minute to go?”
Dana laughed and sucked a mouthful of air playfully forcing against the inside of her cheeks. Her angular face distended into a fleshy bulbous pulp growing redder with each passing moment. Her eyes clamped down tightly like a Chinese waiter who just brought egg rolls for six to the wrong table. Her fists were clinched in a miny tornado of rage.
“Yo Dana, forget it I’m only kidding, we’ll have the birth another day. Besides there’s only 30 seconds remaining for my 1991 tax deduction to happen and personally I don’t think that your up to the drive thru expedient birth.”
Dana relaxed her face and smiled. ” I guess not A.C., I guess not.”
The next week went by rather uneventfully. Every moment, I knew that my impending dad-hood was growing closer, but since I was out of the birthing process at this point, I went about my normal day life, much as Dana, in her puffy, swollen way went about hers. Waiting, sitting, thinking, growing under a swelling umbrela of anxiety and fear.
Unlike many couples on the verge of parenthood, we decided to hit the town one night during the holidays. We figured that Downtown, as they call it here in Greenville would be quieter than usual because most of the students were still away on their vacations. My sister Muffin and her boyfriend Jeff were staying with us at the time. They had come down from Washington D.C. to spend Christmas with us. I was secretly sort of hoping that maybe Baby-Cordan would be born while they were here. I was a tad nervous, and I thought that their presence might help take the edge off of things.
There are just so many days in a row that you can spend cooped up in the house watching TV, eating and reminscing about the past. Finally, we decided it was time to cut loose; shoot some pool, suck down a few brews. With a renewed interest in being young and insouciant we discarded the impending appellation of “future-parents”. We discarded the emotional baggage that had been anchoring us to the homefront for the last several months. With renewed vigor and spring in our step we headed out into the winter darkness; down to a local quaffing hole called the Sports Pad.
As we pulled open the plexi-glass front door to the bar and headed down the front ramp to where the bouncer was checking I.D’s, we were enveloped by a smoke cloud. It hovered in the air thickly like a dense fog rolling in off the Pacific. It was stagnant and choking except for brief moments of movement in which the smoky film would squirm along the the ceiling and sides of the walls like a snake side-widing down a hot piece of asphalt. The carcinegenic cloud moved rythmically as if it were being pushed by blaring power chord blasts of rock and roll. The notes pierced the haze thrusting violently into the atmosphere with lightening bolt incisions of inundating confusion. I felt my head throbbing from the inside out. How will Dana be in this environment I mused to myself. Worse yet, how will be Baby-Cordan fare?
I grabbed hold of Dana who was in front of me as the bouncer was checking her license. “You gonna be O.K. in here?” I asked.
She smiled, nodding affirmatively as the bouncer held up her I.D. card. He looked right thru it gazing at her cascading belly. He smiled and waved us thru as if to say, “I guess you’ve been through enough, go on in and enjoy.”
We moved toward the epicenter of the bar shaking off the hard cold stares of biker scum and black leather clad wenches. There was a rough crowd recreating at the “Pad” this evening. I swaggered up to the bar pushing my way thru long hair, bandana’s and grease. I got my elbows up on the top of the bar triumphantly like some kind of dog terretorially marking his spot. A young bar maid wearing dolphin short shorts approached me with a smile on her face.
“4 Coors Lights, please.”
She spun around with temerity sending a dozen male hearts into a slight flutter. I gazed back at Dana several yards away. Guys were checking her out even though her belly was as obtrusive as a blinking neon sign. Guys are pigs. Give them a beer and they start thinking with their penises. I spotted a couple of real loosers checking her out like she was some sort of painting on display in a museum. Their eyes moved up and down her form from calf to butt to long blonde dancing hair. What a bunch of numbnuts, they either don’t realize or don’t care that she’s as pregnant as this bar is scuzzy. I could read their thoughts, “OOOHH, check out the pregnant chick, she’s hot man!, I’m gonna try and do her.” How inane does it have to get before its socially acceptable to take a human life, I wondered to myself.
“That’ll be Five Fifty sir.” The voice cut thru the heavy metal jamboree of sight and sound like a knife piercing a swollen bladder. I resumed my quondam position at the bar.
“Five Fifty.” She stood there with four bottles waiting patiently from the waist up, but out of my view, below the bar I knew her foot was patting on the heavy rubber pad defiantly, as if to say: “come on ass-hole, cough up the dough so I can get on about my business.”
For a moment, I stared her down, wondering whether to reach out and pop her in the face instilling a full scale bar riot. In a mili-second I weighed the plusses and minuses, tossing her Six dollars. I lowered a shoulder ramming my way thru the slimy crowd two and three deep behind me. I pressed ahead blindly slamming into filthy human flesh. I clutched tightly at the sweaty, frothing bottles of liquid refreshment I was juggling. Then thru a hairy underarm and around a monsterous pair of breasts I caught a glimpse of my group. They looked like an island of purity in a jungle of wretched disease.
Using my shoulder like a machette, I sliced my way thru the scum. Bodies parted in front of me like dense vines and weeds giving way to the onslaught of a furious unrelenting push forward. Finally I made contact with the group’s inner circle. “Dr. Livingston I presume,” I said wisely towards Jeff.
“Huh,” he sputtered looking at me over his shoulder.
“Never mind,” I said as I started passing out the bottles. One for Muffin. One for Jeff. One for Dana. One for Dana! Oh crap; with all the antsillary stimuli frolicking around me, I forgot she was pregnant.
Dana picked up on this anomaly and laughed. Seeing her glowing face relaxed me. It took the edge off the incredible trek I had just embarked on from bar to here. I took a deep refreshing swig off the golden necter letting it slide cooly down the back of my pallet. It burned and clawed as smoke and alcohol washed down my throat into my waiting stomach. I doubled fisted my way over to the two tables that had suddenly opened up for our playing pleasure.
As the night wore on, the D.J. kept the hair on the back’s of our necks standing straight up with song after scratchy song. The smoke undulated on random air currents created by a passing cocktail waitress or blasts of Guns and Roses from the coffin sized speakers that hung arbitrarilly from the ceiling. It was several hours later now, and the bar, like a police line-up was filled with every conceivable type of person. Harley Davidson motorcycle chicks with spray starch bleached hair. Muscle bound skin heads with tank tops clutching at tooth picks. Preppy college students with the latest fashions from New York and slicked back hair. The bar was a technicolor blast of vomit on a sterile white canvas. It was dirty and raw; grotesque yet innocuous.
Like a black head being popped on a teenagers oily cheek, a gusher of humanity rushed up the ramp leading to the outside. Screams and anger poured down upon us in torrents. Out of the periphery of smoke and confusion a balding fat man rushed thru the crowd of miscreants. In his hand was a small black metallic cannister. He held it menacingly outward toward a nefarious stick figure of a man. The man dressed entirely in black was violent and random cursing discernibly over a cacophony of noise. He swung wildly at the fat man with the cannister who was now accompanied by several large bouncers wearing tight fitting T-shirts reading Sports Pad. The bouncers clutched at sawed off cue sticks waiting for an opening to beat the nefarious biker into submission. Then without warning the fat man let loose a deletarious vapor from the cannister. The biker man let out a howl thrusting his hands up in front of his face. He back peddled up the ramp thrusting the plexi glass door open with his back. The fat man spraying toxins incessantly inched his way toward the evil biker man with his entorouge of muscle in close proximity. The crowd around us had swelled together, collectively standing on its tippy toes to see the events transpiring at the other end of the bar. Meanwhile the biker man was now outside the plexi glass boundry staring evil daggers at the fat man who was holding his ground. With the sneer of Charles Manson wiping dried blood from his lips, the biker began kicking the plexi-glass with his heavy black boots. The spurs on the back of freshly polished shit kickers were casting streamers of light around the darkness of the bar. Crack! Crack! Crack! Blow after blow the biker man drop kicked the door with a maniacal grimmace on his angular unshaven face. Then, after absorbing as much punishment as any door should, the plex-glass exploded in towards the fat man. It came undone from it’s moorings floating on the sudden vaccum just created by the violent destruction. Without hesitation the fat man once again began his furrious chemical assault unloading the remainder of his lethal cannister. It coughed and sputtered as the last of the vapor trailed off towards the evil biker man. In a mist of poison the biker man vanished returning to the darkness outside from where he had come. The crowd cheered as one, thrusting their closed fists into the air. We had just experienced a poegrom between good and evil on a battlefield of booze and linoleum. The fat man’s triumph was also ours.
The celebration was short lived. The vacuum created moments ago, was now sucking in the outside air. A cooling wisp of North Carolina wintertime began massaging our warm sweaty skin. It’s coolness carried with it a nasty sting that raped our pulmonary systems. It was suddenly so clear what the cannister was, Mace. It was supposed to beat back villians like the evil biker man. It did that alright. But its lingering desultory rampage was now working us over with all the aplomb of Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare rockets. My eyes began to swell as mucous snot, green and thick began to trickle down the onto my upper lip. My lungs were burning with every breath. I tried to hold my breath, but my system was hyperventillating into a adrenal gland defense mode. My body craved oxygen to combat this invisible poison. It was a dichotomy of impulses; breathe and fight, hold your breath and survive. As I pulled the front of my shirt up over my mouth and nose, the crowd around me, once rigid and defiant was now weak and retreating. The crowd was crying and coughing and looking at one another for direction. Those on the inside were looking to us on the periphery of the man made storm for guidance. One biker wench looked at me with swollen tears in her eyes. Her mascara was running down the sides of her cheeks making her look like an Alice Cooper back stage groopie. Her coughing was strident and forced. Her gigantic brawless breasts vibrated violently with each lung cleansing expulsion. I was blinking uncontrollably as I pushed my way thru the gagging crowd searching for my pregnant wife. Like a scene from dawn of the dead, zombie like scum humans were prowling slowly ahead searching for a zone of fresh air.
I spotted Dana holding onto the side of the wall. She was flushed and cupping her hands over her mouth. I grabbed her by the hand and lead her through the paralyzed maze of flesh. The crowd opened before me as if God was our own personal usher moving people aside yelling “outta the way, this woman is with child.” Way to go God, I thought to myself. Suddenly the coolness of the outside was around us. The concentration of breathable air was growing in direct proportion to each step we took away from the Sports Pad. Like a train, one after another bar patrons hacked their way into the street. Like throwing money down the sewer, the fat man was quickly going broke. He had won the battle, but it was obvious as we opened the door to his competitor next door, he was losing the war. “My good man, a round of beer to wash the mace down with please,” I screamed to the bartender as the night changed venues and continued on.
Compared to this horrofic pre-natal nightmare the ensuing days were timid. To keep my satanical news director assuaged I pressed my nose to the grindstone digging up story after story. This helped to keep my mind occupied during a time of great anxiety. While the days blurred into one another like an inane run-on sentence, the nights were often filled with quick glances at Dana shifting uncomfortably on the couch. I usually stole these sneak peaks during the commercial breaks of old sit coms the networks were visually beating us senseless with.
January 8, 1992. It’s a Wednesday. Nothing special, nothing different. I’m working on a story concerning a group of credit card abusers who have bilked the local department store of close to 25,000 dollars worth of merchandise. They just walked into the store with fake cards and started charging. Jewlery, TV sets, clothes. They went hog wild before they were caught. I was feeling kind of jealous of their economic windfall while I was preparing my story for the evening’s newscast in which I was scheduled to go live from our Greenville Bureau.
Now, a live shot is exactly that. A one time non-rehearsed stab in the dark where your message of information is carried on some furtive micro wave beam over homes and trees and terra firma to hundreds of thousands of strangers who use your every word and thought as their primary basis for current events. I like live shots. I feel that they, more than any other aspect of this business, test abilities of loquacious, informative immediacy. It’s one thing to read it off a teleprompter like the anchors who are overpaid and underworked. It’s also a far cry from recording it onto a piece of video tape, doing it over and over again to get it just right. No a live shot was none of the above. In my estimation it is the quintessential test of a reporter’s accumen. You’re there in front of a camera, with a bright light in your face and the whole world punktilliously watching every molecule of your face. You’re features are big and wide and illuminated in an almost unnatural surreal fashion as thousands of invisible strangers assess your diction and ability to communicate. You have one chance to get it right and only one chance. Usually your best news blooper material comes from poorly handled live shots where either the talent blows it or the technical crew lets you down. These are the components of a live shot.
We had about an hour to air time, and I was ruminating over what I was about to say. “Andy, it’s for you,” my camera man shouted thrusting the phone my way. “I think, it’s the little women, maybe it’s time.”
I laughed as I grabbed the phone from him snickering, “A week ago I may have believed that, today.” I left my sentence unanswered shrugging my shoulders with a grimmace.
“Hello pregnant one, what’s going on?”
Dana’s voice on the other end was soft and sweet with a gentle bounce that permeated a warm glow through the telecommunication system of our city. “Hey A.C., what ya doing?”
“Getting ready for a live shot. What’s new with you?”
“I think I’m having contractions.”
My mind jumped into hyperspace through a rainbow colored nebula gravitating around the milky way. Thougts like glass being shattered with a mallet exploded into a wild energized frenzy in every direction. Screaming noise and endless silence fought one another in the specturm of my frontal lobe as the concept of contraction burned flourescently on stagnanting brain cells.
“Huh,” I murmored into the receiver with all the intellegence of a corpse.
“I think it’s starting. I’m getting pretty painful, powerful contractions that seem to be steady.”
A warm swelling plasma started bubbling in my toes. I wiggled them furiously tring to shake away the numbness. Jim, my cameraman was smiling, somehow kinetically hearing what I was hearing.
“What!”, I blurted out sharply.
Jim laughed and went back about his business with lense adjustments
“Dana, are you sure,” I asked.
“Pretty sure,” she said.
The plasma was bubbling in my toes like warm honey; oozing it’s way up the inside of my legs. I rubbed my thighs to make sure I wasn’t becoming a para-palegic. That happens to some new dads you know.
“Do you want me to come home and blow off the live shot?”
“No, you’ll be home soon though, right?”
“I’m the lead story at 6. I’ll be home by 6:15. Is that cool?”
“O.K. Good luck.”
“You too baby,” I said lovingly, “you too.”
I sat there motionless letting the ooze infaltrate the fatty tissue of my brain. My head felt limp and heavy as if anesthesized by God. PANDA
When we left you in last season’s cliff hanger, Dana had just informed me that her contractions were begining. I was at the office preparing for a live shot for the six o clock newscast. Here now is part two, “The Birth: an up close and personal visitation with God.”
I hung up the phone with a pasty face glaze on my face.
“What’s the deal,” Jim my trusty photographer asked.
“It’s happening man, it’s happening.”
“Are you going to be able to handle this live shot?”
“Yeah no sweat man, no sweat.”
The words left my mouth in a rush like Mexicans scampering across the border into San Diego. I was talking and reacting, but it was like my head was not attached to my body. Everything was in a slow motion haze, a dream sequence where you’re walking through molasses while cranial apparitions and demons chase you down from behind with great salarity.
For some unexplained reason I stood up and began opening up drawers to my desk. I poked around in the small containment spaces pushing paper clips and rubber bands out of the way.
“What are you looking for?,” Jim asked.
I rolled my eyes and smiled. I wasn’t sure. It just seemed like the logical thing to do.
The rest of the hour breezed by. I managed to scribble some notes down on a piece of paper having Jim affix it somewhere near the camera’s lense. I might not have my wits about me, I thought to myself, but there’s no reason for the rest of Eastern Carolina to know that.
The Live shot went off without a hitch. I answered the obligatory questions from the anchors effortlessly; There was no reason not too, I was the one who gave them the questions to ask me in the first place.
I said goodbye to Jim and bolted home. I shut off the scanners and radios. I didn’t want to be tempted by some spot news story that might drag me off to the sight of an accident. That would be a tough one to explain to Blondie. Oh why did I miss the birth of our first and only child?, Well dear, I sort of responded to a shooting down on the West Side and time just kind of got away from me if you know what I mean. I could see it now; BANG. WHAPP. Blow after blow from her dainty hand slapping me upside my thick skull. What a nightmare, I thought to myself. I double checked the on/off switch, to make sure that my unit was News-proof. No news is good news they say. With no news-distractions and no news-temptations, I was headed for home to engage in some industrial strength breathing and hand holding.
I opened the door to find Dana in the living room slumped over at the waist. There was a look of intense burning concentration in her eyes. Her jaw, pronounced and powerful, was locked like a pit bull crushing the soft flesh of a baby’s throat. Her knees were bent slightly absorbing waves of pain like shock absorbers on a Yugo barreling down a cobblestone street. Her beautiful flaxen hair hung limply on her forehead casting a shadow over her face from the 110 watt bulbs overhead.
No easing into this I thought to myself. It’s here, it’s happening, and there’s no turning back. I was sort of hoping as I walked up the front steps to our house, that I wouldn’t be inundated by the birth experience all at once. I was hoping that things would be kind of normal, sedate, so we could just ease into the process, getting the hang of it as the contractions slowly built up in intensity. No such luck! I might as well have brought Mr. Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame, over to the house with me. You know the guy who invented the theory: “whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” I was staring into the bowels of that equation. The genesis of that proverb. Forget about transition. Forget about easing into anything. I opened the door to a brutal exorcism of demons and pain. The words and advice from Lamaze Queen left my head rushing out my ear like a subway car blowing past the platform, back into the darkness of the next tunnel. I was alone inside my own self. 12 hours of cramming for the birth experience hadn’t prepared me for any of this. What do I do?, I thought to myself. Instincts took over. With a little kick in the ass from God’s omniscient toe, I staggered forward to console my wife who was panting like a dog for a Milk Bone on a hot summer day.
“Dana are you O.K.? Is that a contraction?”, I asked blankly.
She stared at me thru bloodshot, swollen eyes. If she wasn’t in so much pain, I’m sure she would have given me one of her pattented cut-downs. “A.C., you’re such a homo!”. It was obvious though this wasn’t one of those times. Dana was riding high on the crest of a 13 foot wall of pain; the kind that surfers on the North Shore salivate for, sell their souls for.
Like a useless vagrant, I stood over her and watched the horror of undulating pain. By my watch, the episode dissipated rather quickly. You could almost see the dark cloud of discomfort leave her auroa as the crest subsided. The color was coming back into her face and her posture was once again righting itself. She let out a long cleansing breath as if to signal that the worst was over.
“What was that like?,” I asked rather inanely.
Dana, the trooper she is, responded to this insideous querry politely and succinctly, “It’s kind of like when you have a bad case of diaherra cramps and your intensines are all in knots.”
“You mean like the time I ate that cheese with the fuzz on the other side of it that was warm and moist with fungus.”
“Yeah, only worse.”
Worse than moist, fungus cheese cramps. That’s gotta be bad news I thought to myself.
“Have you called the hospital?,” I asked Dana renewing my attention on our dilema.
“Not yet A.C., it’s not time.”
“How do you know?” I shot back.
“I just know, O.K. Besides, I don’t want to bother the nurses, they have plenty of other things on their minds I’m sure.”
I felt myself getting angry. “Look, I’m on the cusp of paying these sons-a-bitches a God Damn lotta money, screw them, and how much they gotta work, they’re on our pay roll now.”
Dana left me in mid sentence and walked into the kitchen to pour herself another 7-UP. Case closed I suppose.
I fussed around in the living room doing a lot of nothing while I worked on collecting my thoughts. Like reaching into a long dark closet searching for a shirt on the very last hanger, I forced the fingers of my mind to walk their way back thru the interminable files of my memory. The void was dark without a guiding light to point me the way. Glimpses of faces, old friends, childhood recollections sporadically danced in the darkness. My fingers continued to search, in hopes of locking in to the lessons of the LaMaze Queen.
I fought through a dark milky haze for her features. I needed to see her face. I needed to draw on her countless tales of birth and what to expect. It was all so easy during class, the way she delivered her account of the miracle. She told it like one of your teachers in grammar school would explain what a dangling participle was. It was matter of fact, almost fun. After all as she use to say, “We’ve come a long way when it comes to delivering babies. There’s a lot we know, but my god there’s so much that we can’t explain.” She’d often pause for a moment to let it all sink in; to let the fear of God rum rampant in our misguided thoughts. Then when you needed it most she’d finish the tale with, “But don’t worry. Women have been giving birth for thousands of years with little or no direction. It’s all natural, just let it happen.”
Just let it happen? What does that mean? Grease Dana up and toss some throw cushions down on the linoleum in the kitchen. Just let it happen? Does that mean I can go out drinking with the boys and when I awake from a violent vomit burst clinging to the porcelin support unit, that I’ll be dad. Like some kind of random bad dream I could eliminate with an alkaseltzer tablet, I could just ooze like a snake into dad-hood. I don’t think so. Somehow, I think just let it happen means you better rush your significant other to the sterile confines of the neighborhood maternity clinic.
I shook my head back and forth rapidly so that my cheeks reverberated sending my tongue squishing off the smooth insides of my teeth. Success! I had successfully accessed the Lamaze Queen memory bank of my mind. Megabytes of data were barreling into my frontal lobe like white water down a narrow gorge. It all came into focus.
I went into the kitchen just in time to catch Dana in another keeled over contraction. She was vice-gripping the door latch of the refrigerator with one hand while 7-UP spilled over the edge of her mug.
I rushed to grab her in a measure of support. “Did it just start?” I asked.
“Uhmm!” she nodded her head once.
I grabbed her hand and said in my best Lamaze tone, “O.K. here we go, you ready? Let’s breathe.”
I watched as her forehead wrinkled in discomfort over this suggestion. I knew it was a bad time for logical discussion, so I decided the stearn approach was my only chance to help her deal with the situation.
“Lets go,” I commanded. “Breathe, short, regular breaths, concentrate on the counting. In, one. Out, Two. In again. Out smoothly.”
In class, when we had to go over this exercise, Dana always laughed claiming she was embarrassed and felt stupid. Lamaze Queen told us that when we were at home we were supposed to practice on our own. Many a night, I came home from work and asked her if she had done her practice breathing. She usually smiled and told me that she already knew had to breathe. Yeah well we were about to put that theory to the test in a big way for the next day or so.
With my prodding, Dana mastered the secret of breathing. The breathing doesn’t really take away any of the physical pain, but it does mentally allow you to focus on something rather than just the pain. It’s kind of like a roller coaster ride where you’re flying down two thin metal rails out of control. You’re scared, but you can’t let the person next to you know that. So to filter out the pain you think about having sex with Roseanne Barr. This by itself makes a horrible roller coaster mishap seem almost appetizing so the trip from this point on is a piece of cake. Such is the roller coaster of birth.
The hours melted into one another like warm contraction cheese on piping hot toast. 8 O Clock became 9 O Clock. 9 became 10. Soon the news was on and so was the agony. I was growing weary of coaching. It’s tough mentally draining work. Though I wasn’t physically experiencing the pain, I was undergoing a kind of mental anguish that’s hard to explain. I was working hard, contorting my muscles, breathing rapidly. Whatever it took to keep Dana from crying. She was definately in pain. I think those hours of frantically controlled breathing and stress, caused me to pull something deep down inside. It felt like someone had pinned down one of my testicles to a cold piece of steel. A hammer was poised and raised above the frightened squirming testicle. It wimpered like a new born puppy; it’s eyes closed, defenseless. Too late. With the force of Zeus, A muscle bound hand ripped the hammer thru the air. Molecules of wind whistled as the hard forged steel zeroed in on its vulnerable yet meaty target. Like an F-15 E Strike Eagle blowing a smart bomb up the tail pipe of an Iraqi tank on the run: SQUASH! SPLAT! GOOD-BYE-GONADS! I had somehow pulled something soft and I wasn’t the one having the baby. Just imagine how Blondie was doing.
11:30 P.M. The contractions are sporadic ranging from 2 minutes to 8 minutes. It was around this time that Both Dana and I decided it was time to check in for some clinical help.
As I raced down the darkened streets of Greenville, making sure not to clip a drug dealer or two as I sped along thru the night, I couldn’t help thinking about the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy is having her baby. Ricky is freaking out running into Fred and Etheyl as they all tug at the overnight bag utlitmately sending nighties and other undergarments flying. I felt a small smile crack my lips. I’m doing alright I thought to myself. I didn’t fall down, turn into a rambling Cuban, or even break a sweat.
The birthing center was a sterile white complex of medical technology rising out of the tobacco fields of Greenville. For what it’s worth, it’s the best hospital in the entire Eastern section of the state, but right now medical credentials weren’t exactly a high priority. I suppose if we had to, we could deliver the baby in a Delicatessen. I hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, but according to Lamaze Queen, you never can tell how these things are going to go. The birthing center loomed off in the silent winter distance, illuminated by hazy yellow hallogen spot lights. The parking lot was silent and deserted as we pulled into a slot reserved for expectant fathers.
Entering the huge mechanized sliding glass door of the Birthing Center assuaged the latent fears manifesting themselves inside my swollen being. Like the numbing sensation of a migraine headache dissipating as molecule after molecule of Excedrin migrates into the blood stream, relief spread across my body as pastel clad nurses surrounded us and took charge of an experience which was on the verge of getting away from both of us..
How far apart are the contractions? What’s the effacement coefficient? Metabolic sensitivity of fetus and mother? Terminology flew about the room as a group of blue and pink women with masks on their faces and big tissue paper sacks on their feet spoke to one another. They twisted diodes and attached monitoring devices. It was foreign and scary. I might as well have been in Japan trying to donate my sperm in the nearest sperm bank. That’s how incongrous this atmosphere had become in a matter of moments.
Dana was suffering and there was nothing I could do to help her. I continued to work my Lamaze Magic of stroking her forehead and counting out increments of time for her, but the onslaught of pain would neither cease nor subside. The nurses were kind yet obdurit to it all. After all they deliver a million babies a day. Pain, screaming, anguish, bodily fluid; it’s all apart of the job description. Birthing Nurse: It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure, and a chance to watch husbands squirm uneasily.
For a hospital room; this one wasn’t half bad. It had some furniture and a T.V., and some of the amenities of home. This is why we chose the Birthing Center, because we could give birth and watch our favorite shows at the same time. I guess it could have been worse. We could have been delivering in some blood letting factory in Eastern Czechoslavakia where all the nurses were named Swetlana and had moles on their chins with long oily hairs growing out of them.
Well to make an already long night even longer was the fact that the nurses told us to go home. Not because they found us offensive or anything, but becuase after an exausting array of tests, poking and prodding, they said we still had a while to go. Dana was beside herself and I tasted little granules of stomach bile inch their way up my esophagus where they rested their sour contents on the sensory glands of my tongue. Obviously go home was not the reason we had come in the first place. We had mentally prepared ourselves for the final leg of this birth which we obviously felt would conclude at the hospital. Now we were being told to go home and get some sleep. Yeah sure. That’s like telling someone to smash you in the shin with a stapler every time you doze off. Famous Last words “Get some sleep.” It would be several days before we would be able to institute this very basic human need. With the Birthing Center welcome mat being rolled up and stored away in a closet we cowered back out into the frigid night, alone, scared and contracting; just not noticeably enough for them to help us. The wet wind howeled around us as piled back into the frosty confines of our car.
Our home was dark and uninviting as we pushed the key into the lock. Dana wimpered up the stairs without saying much. I rummaged around in the fridge for a while. I wasn’t really hungry, but sometimes I do some of my best thinking as I’m hunched over staring into the cold, dark carcasses of dinners half eaten and pushed to the rear of the refrigerator. This is where my mind was this night. I scanned thru the cold silver trays that held crumpled pieces of aluminum that were soiled with flesh-tone jellied viscus stuff. I pushed aside cartons of fuzzy looking chinese food from last November. It was simply easier to keep pushing this refuse aside, rather than pulling it out and either eathing it or throwing it away. My mind, the boundless hamper of nasty gym clothes that it is, wondered whether the starving people in India would eat this refrigerated mess. I smiled internally as I envisioned scraping three week old cream of corn out of its dish and into an envelope. I wonder how much postage it would take to mail thawing cream corn to India? I pushed back further into the tundra-like void. Did you ever notice how this food waste land just keeps accumulating in the back reaches of the refrigerator. It’s like a food vaccuum back there where chicken from last week and steak from two weeks ago go to slowly decompose in the quiet darkness of antartic death.
I spent another couple of minutes amusing myself here, before I decided to join my frantic wife. I climbed into bed next to her with anxious trepidation. Dana was having contractions all over the place. She was making wimpering crying sounds in the dark. I wanted to cry myself, but I knew I had to stay strong for both of our sakes. Jeeezus Christ! This is much harder than I ever thought it was going to be. I was sort of hoping it would be like the Brady Bunch. A few pains, a lot of huffing and puffing and by the next commercial break seven or eight of our siblings would come in and oogle at the newest member of the Brady clan. This wasn’t prime time. It was big time and from the looks of things it was going to take time.
To make an already long story, short; noone slept that night. Not Dana. Not me. Not baby Cordan. He kicked and squirmed his way thru the birth canal like a Ninja warrior fighting a bunch of Chuck Norris pansy’s in some B-movie.
By now it was 11 oclock the next morning and Dana was a walking, talking contraction. I thought about calling up Guiness Book of World Records to ask them what the record for labor was. That fleeting thought evaporated as Dana let out another cry as reached out for something to support her weight. She was dead tired and loosing her mind with every muscle quivering dialation.
“Let’s go!”, I shouted.
“O.K.”, she weakly stated as she grabbed her coat heading for the door.
By the time we reached the front desk of the Birthing Center, a whole new group of pastel delivery nurses was on hand. We re-checked in and they put us thru the same Chinese fire drill they did the night before. It was still foreign to me, but this time we were staying put.
Hour after hour slipped away as the pain mounted and Dana’s desire to live decreased. It was now early evening and the birth experience was entering it’s 27th hour. Dana was like a mangled, sweaty piece of tenderized meat. She was groggy, only half conscious of the world around her. It was about this time that she started begging for the pain to cease.
“Please make it stop,” she wailed with eyes shut and fists clenched. “Please make it stop. I want the epidural. Please get the man.”
Nurses from all over descended on Dana. “O.K., dear just relax, we’ll help you, just breathe.”
“I don’t wanna breathe anymore,” Dana bellowed at the Jowly faced nurse above her. “I want the Damn pain to cease, get that man in here, get him in here now.”
The mood had shifted from one of brave waiting to that of angry expectation. Nurses jumped up and ran around like a great chicken that has just had its head sliced off in some ancient tribal ritual.
I don’t know how long it took, but soon a doctor in a stocking cap, who I assume was the anesthesiologist entered the room. He looked at Dana and began yelling chemical equations and metric numerology at the pastel colored brigade of nurses at his disposal. Then he looked over at me.
“Hey I know you don’t I?” he asked with a slight grin that protruded thru his dark green mask.
I hate when people ask me who I am. That’s one of Dana’s pet peaves. She said I should be proud of my job as a News Reporter. I am, I suppose, but I don’t like announcing my personal life to perfect strangers. To this guy, I’m an invited guest in his living room each night at six oclock as he and his family eat dinner and then again at 11 o clock as he mounts his wife in a sexual flurry that is directly proportional to the severity of the news I’m broadcasting.
“Don’t I know you?” he asked again as he fidgeted with tubes and catheters.
I felt embarrassed and not real talkative. “I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said coldly. I didn’t give him a chance to respond. “Look my wife is freaking dying here, let’s get her some relief.”
He waved his hands and murmored to a few of the nurses there to carry out his every whim. They moved Dana into a sitting position so that he’d have access to her dainty spinal area.
As he began inserting a long sterile needle into the fleshy meat of her back, he again turned his attention towards me. “Your Andy Cordan, the newsman, aren’t you.”
I guess putting a razor sharp device into a woman’s back is old hat for this guy, kind of like you or me chewing gum and walking at the same time, but to me, in my tired stressed out condition, this guy was some kind of twisted Dr. Kevorkian wiring up my wife to his suicide machine.
I totally ignored his question as I attempted to channel my anger into more productive re-directing tones. “Look Doc, how long will it take before this numbing crap kicks in?”
“Once I find the sweet spot, ahh, there it is, it shouldn’t take long at all,” I watched as inch after inch of sterile darning needle slid easily into Dana’s back.
I winced a little. This was going to be a bloody mess I thought to myself. Birth is no day at the beach!
It wasn’t long before Dana’s face began to change. Her death grip snarling teeth-clench look was subsiding giving way to a relaxed easiness. The muscles of her jaw were over due for a rest.
“I’m going to give her 10 CC’s of Fenagrin,” the Doctor said as he pushed some clear liquid out of a syringe into Dana’s I.V. “This will definately take some of the edge off for her.”
No sooner had the Doctor said this then Dana’s eyes began to close as a cocophony of nurses helped her lay her head back on her pillow. She was asleep.
I wiped my forehead, even though there was no moisture there. Peace had settled on the little room. Like the tranquil ripples that stretch out endlessly banging onto the shore line of a small pond, the room was sedate, quiet.
“Man that’s a nice sound isn’t it?,” I said to the doctor. I managed a smile that he reciprocated.
“So you never did answer my question?”
At one point I thought of this man as some kind of deranged lunatic poking razors into my pregnant wife. But like a pleasant shift in a shoreline breeze, he was now my friend.
“Yeah Doc, you nailed that one, I’m Andy Cordan.”
He smiled broadly. “I thought so.”
Its strange this world we live in, I thought to myself. Here’s a guy who capped the raging volcano of pain my wife was feeling. His magic touch had made a real difference in our quality of life, and here he was obviously impressed that I’m on the t.v. that comes into his home for 90 seconds a night. In the broad context of things, my job is nowhere as fufilling. He brought with him a degree of soothing goodness into the room as the auroa of a new life was about to burst into the world. How could I match that. My resume is filled with crimminals and junkies taking from this world, hurting the neighborhoods we all live in. My reality for 90 seconds a night is a ghastly view into an area of town that this man tells his wife to purposely avoid when she’s driving alone. But in some weird way my credentials were the important ones while his work was the pedestrian of the two. It’s a strange world we inhabit isn’t it?
Halftime at this most colosol of superbowls of birth was over with the suddeness of a shrill from a referees whistle. Dana’s eyes opened up and the pain was back. Not nearly as intense as previously, but it was unmistakenly taking control of the situation. It was now close to 10 P.M. In horse racing vernacular, we were rounding the final turn and heading for home.
Our jowley faced nurse, Cathy, propped Dana up in the bed commanding her to push. Dana screamed and clawed and clenched her teeth together. The doctor sat there like a catcher waiting for the signals from the pitcher up on the mound. It was Dana’s game to win or lose. The ball was in her hands. The coach had decided that he would stick with her to the end even though she had shown sure signs of weakening over the course of the game.
I hung out in the far distance, watching and pacing and wondering how much more of this I could take. Dana was sweating and crying. She was screaming and asking for the doctors to make the pain stop. The babies head was visible in a golden ray of heavenly light. It was the most remarkable thing a person can ever hope to see. If this was a movie the special effects budget would put Terminator II to shame. There Baby Cordan was; living, breathing, just hanging on the edge of this world waiting for that final push from the darkness of liquid life he had occupied for the last 9 months. I paced back and forth watching the miracle thru fingers spread just enough to allow me an unobstructed view. I had a front row seat in the greatest game ever played. Dana was on the mound pitching with steadfast greatness as God played all the other 8 positions in the field. Normally I’d say asking one player to cover every other spot on the field is simply asking too much, but in this case, God was having a pretty good season and I felt like he could handle the responsibility.
Every so often I had to go into an antsillary linen closet and regroup my thoughts and emotions. It was too much for any one man to behold for any length of time. There lodged in between my wife’s legs was the face of my child. I could see the face, it was perfect like a lush ripe strawberry that’s filled with juice and refreshment on a beautiful spring day. His nose, his eyebrows, his little mouth. It was all perfect and right there. No more was it a guessing game of what his sonogram looked like, no more was it wondering what his features would look like. There in all of his wonder he perched, waiting for that final push.
“Please take him out, please take him out, please it hurts so much, please, please!”, Dana’s screams ripped thru the moment like a razor slicing off a piece of flesh. The doctors tried to reassure her telling her it was almost over, just a few more pushes. Dana was exausted and spent. If only she could see the child from my point of view, if only she could see his face, his pristine delicate features. But she couldn’t. Her eyes were closed fixated on a world a million miles away. A world where pain was oxygen and suffering was light. She screamed again, a crackly plea for help. I bit down hard on my hand. Why won’t they help her? Make her pain go away? Why won’t the baby come out?
Then as if God had come in from third base and chatted with Dana up on the mound to just take it easy and concentrate; get this one more pitch over and the game would be history, Dana expelled a new life into the world. It was a fierce jungle grunt that echoed in the cieiling rafters. Baby Cordan slithered into the hands of the waiting doctor who caught him with the greatest aplomb. She spanked his bottom as a rush of life whisked into his lungs which up to that moment had known only a sphere of liquid life.
“Congratulations daddy,” the doctor said turning in my direction. “You have a brand new son.”
I felt my eyes swell with tearful joy. I didn’t want to cry in front of everyone so I quickly wiped away the falling tear. A son I thought to myself. His wails were a welcome hello. It was 12:52 A.M. January 10th. After a battle with contraction warriors which had lasted over 36 hours, The Cordan’s were victoriously new parents in a brave new world. For a few unsettling moments the delivery room had taken on the specter of a medical Vietnam where blood, and guts and screams were whipping around in a nebulous jungle fervor of pain and anguish. But like ground grunts hunkered in for a long messy battle, we had outlasted the enemy and taken the target. In this case a 5 pound 12 ounce baby boy named Alexander Julian Cordan. Dana mustered up a weak smile as baby Zander or Z-man as we call him got his first look at mom; a woman who has taken my respect for women and re-forged it into a substance harder than