They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat Page 6

  You can’t put that many tubes in a man and manage to keep a smile on his face. Either the man was simply an actor playing the part of a patient, I surmised, or he was dead. I know what probably killed him, too. He ate the chunky stuff with the lumpy brown gravy on it.

  They ran all sorts of tests on me. A nurse came in and took out something sharp and cut a slice out of my arm.

  “Okay, I’ll eat the food,” I said.

  She explained I wasn’t being punished. She was merely checking to see how I bled.

  I bled pretty well. All down my arm, in fact.

  “That’s perfect,” the nurse said smiling, while I laid there bleeding all down my arm.

  “There’s a knife fight Saturday night,” I said to the nurse. “Want to go?”

  I think she would have cut me on the other arm, but a doctor walked in to check my heart. He put his stethoscope to my chest and then he asked if I wanted to take a listen.

  I had never heard my own heart beat. I asked what to listen for.

  “The sound the heart is supposed to make goes like this: ‘lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub,’” the doctor said. “If you will listen closely, you will hear yours go, ‘lub-dub, shhhh, lub-dub, shhhh, lub-dub, shhhh.’ The shhhh is the sound of the blood leaking back through your valve.”

  I listened. The doctor was wrong. My heart didn’t go “lub-dub, shhh.” It went “lub-dub-dub-dub-dub, bzzzt.”

  “The only way your heart would be making a sound like that is if you had sat up half last night and drank two gallons of beer,” the doctor said.

  My surgeon peeked in. I could tell from his voice he had a slight cold.

  “Try not to worry about a thing,” he said, just before he sneezed.

  As soon as he left, I called for the guy with the weird shoes and asked for Valium, as much as they could spare.

  Nobody mentioned the shave to me. There was a knock on my door.

  “Come in,” I said. More questions or more tests.

  A man entered carrying a pan of water.

  “I’m Doctor Prep,” he said, pulling a razor out of the pan of water.

  “Doctor Prep?”

  “I’m the one who preps you for surgery,” he said.

  “Preps me?”

  “Shaves you.”

  “I shaved this morning.”

  “Not where I’m going to shave you.”

  I looked a the window. If I couldn’t get out through there, I thought, maybe I could hide under the bed with my lunch.

  Escape was out of the question. I pulled back the covers.

  “Nice pajamas,” said Doctor Prep.

  “Say that again without that razor in your hand,” I said back to him.

  I took off my pajamas. I was wearing nothing but my hair. In thirty-five years, I had accumulated quite a bit of hair on my body. Hair can cause infections during surgery.

  Dr. Prep took most of it. He started at my neck. He shaved my chest. He shaved my stomach. He spent ten minutes shaving in my navel. I didn’t even know I had hair in my navel.

  He shaved on. When he got to my dignity, I closed my eyes.

  He stopped at my knees.

  “When we do bypass,” he said, “I shave ’em all the way down to their ankles.”

  In bypass heart surgery, they take portions of arteries from the legs to replace the clogged arteries near the heart.

  “You seem to enjoy this work,” I said to Dr. Prep.

  “Beats plucking chickens,” he answered, closing the door behind him.

  I figured the worst was over. Then, there was another knock on the door. I wasn’t going to be surprised again.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “Come to check your plumbing,” a voice answered.

  That’s all I needed. I’d been questioned and requestioned, had a nurse cut my arm and a man shave my knees, legs, chest, privates, and belly bald and now here came the man with the rubber glove.

  I couldn’t bear to look. I rolled over on my stomach, beckoned him in, and waited for the intrusion. Thirty seconds later, I heard the toilet in my restroom flush. I turned around and there stood a man wearing a brown shirt with his name sewn over the pocket holding a plunger.

  “Nothing to worry about now,” he said. “It flushes fine.”

  I called for more Valium.

  There were only a couple of more things. There was the enema. I will spare you the details of that. I was told I could order something out to eat if I didn’t want what the hospital was serving for dinner. I think they were afraid maybe I had a gun and would use it if they brought me anything else to eat out of the hospital kitchen.

  I sent my wife out for chili dogs. I saved them until after my enema. A hospital patient takes his revenge where he can.

  Night came. Twelve hours to go. The nurse slipped her head through the door and said I had a visitor.

  “If he doesn’t have a razor, let him in,” I said.

  My minister walked into my room.

  “Anything on your mind?” he asked.

  “Pull up a chair,” I answered.

  6

  Good Men of God

  Brother Dave Gardner, the Southern philosopher, used to talk about how his mother had wanted him to be a man of God.

  “My mother used to say, ‘Son, you could make a million dollars preaching,’” he would begin. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, Mama, but what the hell would I spend it on?’”

  It’s not easy being a preacher, especially these days. Preachers have to work harder than ever before keeping their flocks in line what with temptations at a new all-time high. I suppose the really big-time preachers, like Billy Graham and Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell, have it made, though. Every time I pick up a newspaper there’s a story about one of those heavyweight television preachers making a trip to Russia, or speaking out on international issues, or having a vision that tells him to go out and raise a few million bucks.

  I always wonder when those guys find time to work on their sermons. When do they visit the sick and marry people and preach funerals?

  Who mows the grass around their churches, and if one of their followers has a problem, like he lost his job and his wife split and his trailer burned all in the same week, when do those preachers have time to go talk to the poor soul?

  I’m old-fashioned when it comes to preachers. I grew up in a small Methodist congregation, and I got used to preachers who were always there when you needed them, who mowed the grass around the church, and who even knocked down the dirt daubers’ nests in the windows of the sanctuary so the dirt daubers wouldn’t bother the worshippers while the preacher was trying to run the devil out of town on Sunday mornings. Every time I see Billy Graham on Meet the Press or catch Oral Roberts or Jerry Falwell on the tube, I always wonder if they have ever knocked down any dirt daubers’ nests. Every time I see any of those high-powered evangelists, I also wonder whatever happened to Brother Roy Dodd Hembree, who tried but never quite made it over the hump into the land of evangelical milk and honey.

  Brother Roy Dodd came to town every summer when I was a kid with his traveling tent revival and his two daughters, Nora and Cora. Nora was the better looking of the two, but Cora had more sense. Nora would do just about anything, including get bad drunk and then tell her daddy what local bird dog had bought her the beer. Brother Roy Dodd would then alert the sheriff’s office in whatever county he happened to be preaching in at the time and demand the heathen buying Nora beer be locked up for the duration of his revival as a means of protecting his daughters.

  Neither Nora nor Cora need much protection, if the truth be known. Nora could cuss her way out of most any tight spot, and Cora had a black belt in switchblade.

  Brother Roy Dodd’s tent revival was the highlight of our summer, not only b
ecause of the opportunities Nora and Cora afforded, but also because Brother Roy Dodd put on a show that was in thrills and sheer excitement second only to the geek who bit the heads off live chickens at the county fair each fall.

  They said Brother Roy Dodd was from over in Alabama and he used to be a Triple-A country singer until he got messed up with a woman one night in a beer joint where he was singing. The woman did a lot of winking and lip-pooching at Brother Roy Dodd during his act, and later, she told him her husband had gone to Shreveport to pick up a load of chickens and wouldn’t be home until Saturday morning and there was still an hour or so left in Thursday.

  Brother Roy Dodd, they said, knew there was trouble when, as he and the woman were in the midst of celebrating Friday night, he detected a poultry-like odor about the room. That was just before he heard two gunshots. Brother Roy Dodd caught one in each hip and it was shortly after the shooting, he found the Lord.

  “When he had recovered from his injuries, Brother Roy Dodd bought a tent and an old school bus and set out to spread the Word and his interpretation of it with a Bible he borrowed from his hospital room.

  One night in Palatka, Florida, Brother Roy Dodd converted fourteen, including a young woman who had done some winking and lip-pooching of her own during the service.

  After the service, Brother Roy Dodd confirmed the fact his winking and lip-pooching convert had no husband nor any connection with the business of transporting chickens, and asked the young woman if she would like to leave Palatka behind her. She consented and they said Brother Roy Dodd married himself to her, standing right there in the sawdust.

  Her name was Dora. Hence, Nora and Cora. Dora learned to play piano and accompany Brother Roy Dodd when he sang the hymn of invitation each night, “Just As I Am (Without One Plea),” but Nora and Cora strayed early. Nora was smoking when she was nine, drinking when she was eleven, and she ran off one night with a sawmill hand from Boaz, Alabama, when she was thirteen, but came back three weeks later, with his truck and the $50 he gave her to leave.

  Cora was a couple of years younger than Nora and they said she had taken after her daddy as far as music went, but she had a wild side, too, and learned how to knife fight the year she spent in reform school when she was fourteen. Her crime was lifting the wallet out of a deputy sheriff’s trousers, the pair he shouldn’t have taken off in the back seat of his cruiser out behind the tent one night during a revival near Swainsboro, Georgia.

  My older cousin took me to see Brother Roy Dodd the first time. I was nine. My cousin was sixteen and he had a car. Everybody else came to find the Lord. My cousin came to find Nora and Cora, which he did. I said I could find a ride home, and the next day, he told me how Nora had taken drunk later that night and how Cora had tried to cut a man for looking at her wrong.

  “I never heard such cussing as Nora did,” my cousin said.

  “You ought to have heard her daddy,” I said.

  I had never heard anybody speak in tongues before I heard Brother Roy Dodd. He was up in front of everybody and he was rolling forth out of Galatians, when, suddenly, he was caught in the spirit.

  His eyes rolled back in his head and his voice boomed out through the tent:

  “ALIDEEDOO! ALUDEEDOO! BOOLEYBOOLEYBOOLEYBOO!”

  “Praise God, he’s in the spirit!” said a woman behind me.

  “Praise God, he is!” said her husband.

  “Don’t reckon Brother Roy Dodd’s sick, do you?” asked another man, obviously a first-timer.

  Brother Roy Dodd tongue-spoke for a good six or eight minutes before the spirit finally left him and he went back to talking so you could understand what he was saying.

  Brother Roy Dodd explained that the “tongue” was a gift only a blessed few received. I asked the Lord to forgive me, but I was so deeply hopeful at that moment I would never be so blessed. I was afraid I might get in the spirit and never get out.

  A couple of years later, there was some more excitement at Brother Roy Dodd’s revival. In the middle of one of Brother Roy Dodd’s sermons, a man stood up in the back and shouted, “Brother Roy Dodd! Have you ever taken up the serpent?”

  Brother Roy Dodd said he hadn’t.

  “Would you take up the serpent to prove your faith?” asked the man.

  “Never been asked to,” answered Brother Roy Dodd.

  “Well, I’m asking you now!” bellowed the man, who rushed toward the pulpit with a wrinkled brown sack in his hand. He dumped the contents of the sack at Brother Roy Dodd’s feet and the crowd gasped. Out of the sack came a cottonmouth moccasin of some size. The snake did not appear to be overjoyed with the fact it was currently involved in a religious experience.

  I knew all about taking up the serpent. It had been in the papers. There was a sect that believed a certain passage of the Bible beseeched a man to hold a snake to prove his faith. The papers had a story about a man who had been bitten recently by a timber rattler during services over at a church in Talbot County. The faithless scoundrel nearly died.

  Brother Roy Dodd wasted little time in dealing with the snake. He picked up a metal folding chair in front of the piano, the one his wife Dora had vacated immediately upon seeing the snake, and beat hell and guts out of it.

  When the snake was no longer moving, Brother Roy Dodd picked it up and held it before the stunned crowd.

  “Shame I didn’t have a chance to save this belly-crawling sinner before the Lord called him home,” said Brother Roy Dodd.

  The crowds began falling off for Brother Roy Dodd as the years passed. He added a healing segment to his performance to try to pick things up.

  Miss Inez Pickett, a stout woman in her late fifties, came to see Brother Roy Dodd one night, complaining of what women used to call “the old mess,” some sort of kidney disorder that was usually only whispered about.

  Brother Roy Dodd, dressed in a sequin jacket he’s held on to since his singing days, asked Miss Inez where it hurt.

  “My back,” said Miss Inez.

  Brother Roy Dodd put his hands firmly on Miss Inez’s back and shook her kidneys with great force as he prayed.

  “Did you feel that, Sister Inez?” asked Brother Roy Dodd.

  “Lord Godamightly, I think I did!” shouted Miss Inez.

  “You’re healed!” said Brother Roy Dodd.

  Miss Inez, plagued by her infirmity for many years, bounded about the platform in the manner of a much younger woman and made a number of joyful noises. I was afraid she was going to break into tongue.

  Instead, she fell off the platform in her excitement, and you could hear the bone snap in her leg.

  “Somebody call an ambulance!” the first one to her said.

  “No need to do that,” said somebody else. “Just get Brother Roy Dodd to give her another healing.”

  “Don’t do no broke bones,” said Brother Roy Dodd. “Just vital organs.”

  I was sixteen the summer Brother Roy Dodd didn’t come back anymore. We heard all sorts of things. Nora and Cora left him for good, they said. Dora, his wife, got sick and couldn’t play piano anymore. There was even something about a sheriff down in Mississippi someplace finding some white liquor on Brother Roy Dodd’s bus.

  That was a long summer, that summer Brother Roy Dodd didn’t come back. We just sort of sat around and waited for fall and the fair and the geek who bit the heads off live chickens.

  Talking to my preacher was my last order of business before getting on with the matter of the surgery on my heart.

  I had heard all the statistics. Emory Hospital’s most recent figures concerning heart surgery were quite favorable. The mortality rate was under three percent, and that included those who went to the table in desperate conditions.

  One of my doctors had also assured me of the relative safety of the operation. He said there is always the unknown factor,
but in many ways, when a person goes through surgery, he or she is safer than at any other time of his or her life because every part of the body is being closely monitored.

  I was only thirty-five. They had called me an “excellent surgical risk.” Still there was no absolute guarantee I might not wind up Emory’s Upset Special of the Week, so I did, in fact, have to deal with the possibility my end might be near.

  I had my will drawn up before I went to the hospital. Wills always begin by making reference to the fact the person about to dole out his life’s belongings in the event of his demise is sound of mind. A person with complete control of his faculties wouldn’t do such a thing in the first place.

  Making out a will is depressing. I’ll be honest. When it comes down to it, you really do want to take it with you.

  Take my red coat. The Christmas before, I received the gift of a red, ultra-suede sports jacket. I don’t know exactly where I was supposed to wear a red, ultra-suede sports jacket since I don’t attend Shriners’ conventions, but it was a rather spiffy jacket, nonetheless.

  I had shown it to a friend earlier, who was quite impressed.

  “Wish I had a coat like that,” he said.

  “Where would you wear it?” I asked, just for the record.

  “Next Shriners’ convention,” he said.

  My friend came to visit soon after he found out about my impending heart surgery.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “People go through these operations all the time. It’s a piece of cake.”

  You would be surprised how many people told me how easy heart surgery was going to be before I went in to have heart surgery. Most of them, incidentally, had never been through medical procedures any more serious than offering a urine specimen.

  “Still got that red coat?” my friend asked. I began to catch his drift.

  “Still got it,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you never know about these things. I was just thinking that if you didn’t make it through—not that there’s one in a million chances you won’t—maybe I could have your red coat.”