FDNY

John Matthews

Sidney has cancer. You don’t know what kind. You don’t treat him. You just drive him to his radiation treatments. It’s a volunteer program, a church thing. You don’t go to church. Neither does Sidney. But your wife does, and so does Sidney’s boss, or rather his former boss. So somehow you got paired up with him.

     You first find Sidney’s house on the other side of a busy three-lane highway during a rainstorm. You can’t see a place to pull over, so you have to drive a mile past, come back, and park on the berm, two wheels out on the blacktop.

     There are four cars in the driveway. Only one appears drivable and it is nearly touching yours. A Cadillac with a missing fender and a raised hood sits in front of a flatbed trailer with three motorcycles strapped on it. As you walk through the knee high grass, you nearly bump into a John Deere riding mower. 

     Before you can knock, a woman’s voice calls out “It’s not locked!”

     The woman stands at the kitchen stove. She doesn’t offer you a seat, for good reason. Every flat surface, including the floor, is stacked with boxes, magazines, newspapers, dirty dishes, car parts, and unfolded laundry. 

      “Sid’s almost ready,” says the woman. She is at the only uncluttered burner on the stove, stirring some kind of cooked cereal in one of the place’s better looking pieces of cookware, a plastic Cool Whip container. She sees you looking at it nervously.

     “Don’t worry. Stove’s not on. I heated it in the microwave.”

      You can see a slightly blurred fleur-de-lis tattoo on the web of skin between the thumb and finger of her stirring hand.

    “He’s back there,” she points with a dripping spoon. As she turns, you can see another blurred tattoo that appears to be a werewolf peeking over her tank top. You casually wipe your glasses to get a better look. Still blurred. It’s not you.

     Sidney is spread-eagled on a La-Z-Boy recliner in the next room, shirtless. Another woman is bent over him working on… something.

     “Be right there,” he says. “This is the visiting nurse. She’s patchin’ me up. My feedin’ tube was leakin’. Didn’t want to drip in your car.” 

      The drivable car you saw must  be the nurse’s. You offer to move and let her out, but she declines. The quickest way for her to get out is to have you get out with Sidney.

     She works efficiently, under the light of a large, illuminated picture of the New York City skyline. Tiny points of light shine out from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. 

     “Like it?” asks Sidney. “Guy selling them door to door. Part of the price goes to a fund for the New York City Fire Department.”

    He pulls on a camo T-shirt. It gets stuck on the tape the nurse has just applied to his stomach.

“Don’t really need this tube,” he says. “Doc insisted, though. In case the radiation keeps me from eatin’. But I can’t drive. Doc’s afraid pushin’ on the pedals could blow the tube out.”

     As you walk out past the hidden mower, you bump into a realtor’s For Sale sign. 

     You ask Sidney if he is moving.

     “Soon’s we can. Actually the house is already sold. But I have to keep the sign up till the place passes all the inspections.”

     He explains there are minor electrical, plumbing, and heating problems. And the matter of an outbuilding that had been crushed by a falling tree. He has been trying to take care of this problem himself with a chainsaw you noticed, carefully stored under the open hood of the Cadillac. 

     “Sorry about your car,” he says. “You coulda pulled up beside the Caddy there. The ground’s solid even if you can’t see it. Hafta keep the cars parked in front of the bike trailer. Makes it harder for the repo guys to get to ‘em. I’m still behind on the Yamaha, but I’ll pay it off when the check comes.”

     Sidney is living on Social Security disability and an insurance settlement he got from his last employer after being rammed by a forklift at work. 

     “The company was fair,” he says as you drive together to the hospital. “Paid right away. I gave the check to some broker guys. They was supposed to set up an investment annuity so’s I could live off the income. But they put it in them toxic mortgages and lost it all. But I’ll get it back. It was clearly fraud, see? Then I can pay off the Yamaha, pay a guy I know to fix up the house, and cover the check for the down payment on the new place we’re buyin’.”

     Sidney explains that the Yamaha was originally purchased for a woman who showed up one day claiming to be his daughter. 

     “She had no proof, but the woman she says is her mother, well, it coulda happened. The dates are right. But I don’t owe her nuthin’. Statute of limitations. I was just the sperm donor. She wanted a DNA test. You know what that costs? Instead, I agreed to go half on the down payment on the Yamaha. But then she stopped makin’ payments. So now I have it.”

     There’s a little more room in the driveway when you pull back in after the radiation session is over. A shirtless figure is visible  in the house’s upstairs window.

     “My son,” says Sidney. “He’s unemployed, but he’s tryin’. Just finished a course to be a tattoo artist. Could be good money. Not licensed yet, but he’s been practicing on his girlfriend Bev. You met her, right? In the kitchen.”

     The two of you sit in the car watching as the son shifts his weight on the windowsill. He lights a cigarette. A big, pale, hairy walrus of a guy.

     “Look at him,” says Sidney. “And the stupid jerk just got Bev pregnant… with twins.”       

     The list goes on. There were promised jobs that never materialized, unpaid bills for the tattoo course and used tattoo equipment, traffic fines that had to be ignored, and a misplaced lottery ticket that he is sure was a winner. 

    If some people’s lives are described as train wrecks, then Sidney’s life is a space shuttle explosion. He’s made some bad decisions. You never heard him take the blame for any of his misfortunes.

     But he didn’t decide to get cancer. And you never saw him in anything other than a happy and optimistic mood.

     You would never insult him by covering your car seat with an old towel.