I wasn’t always down. Most of my life, to that point, had been blessed. An angel touched me as I was lying in a coma in a hospital in Portland. That’s the story my mama always told about the nice young orderly who helped her bathe me and change the linens. I was four years old and I awoke from my coma the next morning into a strange life. Apparently much different than the one I’d been living before.

I met a girl in the Fifth Grade. It was 1959. Immigrant, Russian Jew, fresh from a year in Israel after escaping the USSR. I . . . I don’t want to call it a Thunderbolt. I mean, I could think of nothing else but her after that. I would close my eyes at night and only see her face. Ah, what the fuck! It was a Thunderbolt. I thought, So this is why I awoke from the coma speaking Russian. God does have a plan. She became my best friend. My girlfriend. My lover. Her name was Rivka Koen. She was special. She was an Angel.

***

New York City was noisy and dirty and seemed to numb me in a way that was not unpleasant. I spent a few nights sleeping rough in Central Park, wandering around Manhattan during the day. It was June and the weather was warm. I was almost out of cash so I opened an account at the Bank of Manhattan and arranged for the transfer of my savings. It wasn’t that much. I was going to have to find a job and a place to stay. I saw an ad in the Village Voice for a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. So I checked into a hotel, did my laundry, got cleaned up and hopped on a train to the Village. The flat was a studio over a bakery. The landlords were the owners of the bakery, Russian immigrants, Vasily and Paolina Mirianov.

It was several minutes before I even realized our conversation in Russian didn’t make me feel bad, didn’t trigger thoughts of Rivka rotting in a damp cell, didn’t cause me to relive having my heart torn out. We started the interview at 9am, a time between the early morning rush and the lunch rush. They had no employees. It was just them. Paolina asked most of the initial questions, establishing I wasn’t a psycho killer or a drug addict. Vasily was more concerned with the financial part of it. Was I going to be able to pay the rent every month? We hit it off and I fanninged the situation. It was an interesting fanning but there were no negative outcomes. Didn’t matter what I did, I’d survive the day. Vasily showed me the flat.

One room with a high ceiling and a large skylight, a kitchen counter on the street side with a single window over the sink and a refrigerator to the left. A bed on the opposite wall and a small bathroom with a tub and a small window up high on the wall. 

“Rent is due the first of the month. If not received by the fifth, there is a 10% penalty. Understood?” Vasily asked.

“Of course, absolutely. Nyet problem, No problem. Thank you so much.”

“Do you need help with your things, Mikhael?” 

“Everything I have is in this backpack.”

“Alright. Our daughter, Sofia, will bring up linens and blankets for the bed when she gets home from school.”

I signed the lease, paid first and last, and got the keys, one to the entrance on the street and one for my front door which was two flights up. I sat down on the bare mattress and for the first time since leaving the Hansens I felt truly alone. I pictured my Rivka, my beautiful blonde, auburn-haired, blue eyed angel, in some Siberian gulag and my heart ached. I hung my head and cried.

***

I ventured out late that afternoon and got a little lost. Wandered for hours. It was dusk. Rounding a corner I walked right into the middle of a bunch of drunken Irishmen. In the middle of them was a dark haired, dark eyed, young woman who was being taunted and not being allowed to pass. As I arrived I saw one of the men push her into the arms of another. She was in a long dark dress with long sleeves and the man who’d just pushed her was wearing what I thought was probably a hijab around his neck. I figured it was hers. She was crying and pleading with them in what I felt pretty sure was Arabic. Wrong place, wrong time. Ten drunken Irishmen.

I quieted my mind and inhaled against resistance. And then I was inhaling the universe and the fannings came. The cards fanned out at the wide end of a funnel and there were a lot of action/consequence pairs. In several I saw me lying in the street, bleeding out. Very few ended with them letting the girl proceed on her way. I snapped back.

The frightened young woman, probably my actual age, fifteen, was being held by both arms from behind by the man who’d pushed her earlier. 

“Leave her alone,” I heard myself saying loud enough to be heard over the laughing and jeering.

“Oh . . . what do we have then?” It got quiet. I identified this guy as the leader and, as I’d hoped, his attention was suddenly and solely, on me. Irish guy out of central casting with flaming red hair.

I thought, What the fuck . . . “You need to leave her alone and let her pass,” I said quietly in my best Irish accent, looking directly at the man who’d just spoken. I wasn’t sure what I was doing with the accent but it seemed right. It wasn’t.

“Hey, Boyo, far from home, are ya then? Are ya from up North around Derry . . . or maybe Boyle?”

I knew what he was doing, thinking he was toying with me . . . Was I Protestant or Catholic? Ooh, if I answer wrong, I’m dead. But I knew I’d been sussed.

“Ah, nevermind,” he said, “and your accent . . . is shite.”

I never wondered anymore why I didn’t get frightened in fight or flight situations. I could feel the adrenaline alright. I just wasn’t afraid of getting hurt. I remembered my introduction to street fighting. I was seven years old.

I’d been in the garage under my brother, Al’s bedroom, doing calisthenics, pushups, pullups, just feeling generally restless. I could hear the radio above. He’d been listening to the Portland Beavers game, a minor league club attached to the Cleveland Indians. He switched to a pop station, KISN, after the Beavers lost. Rickey sang, “Poor little fool, oh yeah,” then Johnny, “I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way . . .” 

Al and I weren’t close, but we saw each other all the time. I thought that if he didn’t have to eat, an activity necessitating a visit to the house, I’d probably never see him. He was drifting further from the family, it seemed, almost every day. My sister, Sally Anne, would hang out with him in his room, but he and I never just hung out. I thought, understandable. Little seven-year-old brother. What did we have in common? My oldest brother, Sean Patrick, I thought, was totally happy with the situation. I believed Sean P felt, the less he saw of Al, the better.

I wanted to know my brother. I had no memory of what our relationship had been before my illness, but since my illness, for the last three years, it was just kind of a hole in my life. And I didn’t know what to do about it. Finally I thought, Fuck it! And went up the stairs to Al’s bedroom and pounded on the door so he’d hear me above the cranked up radio.

He opened the door and smiled at me like James Dean. “Hey, Squirt!”

“Hey, Al . . . you got a minute? I got some questions.”

He opened the door and walked into the middle of the room. His version of  “Come on in.”

Elvis was blasting from Al’s radio on his desk. “Well since my baby left me . . .”  He turned it down a little. Both windows facing the house were open and a warm late summer breeze blew in. And a good thing, too. Al’s room stank of fourteen-year-old boy. His single bed on the North wall, had a fitted sheet which, at one time, had been white. A pillow and a quilt were the only other things on the bed and I was pretty sure they were where he’d left them when he’d gotten up that morning. There was a closet on the East wall and next to it, a desk, which seemed to have been rarely used except for supporting the radio, and the windows were on the West wall. Posters of Elvis, James Dean, and Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall in Wanted Dead or Alive festooned the walls.

The only other items in the room were a large, overstuffed easy chair in the middle and a chest of drawers on the South wall upon which was a record player. An electric guitar was hooked up to and leaning against a small Fender Champ amp. There was a full length mirror between the chest and the entrance to the room and in the mirror frame were stuck various photos of Al, some goofy, some with friends, some with a variety of girls, and one where he was posing like Steve McQueen, Al’s blonde hair cut in McQueen’s style.

“What’s up, little brother?”

“I’m starting Fourth Grade tomorrow and I . . . I want you to show me how to fight.”

He did a double take and said, “Why ask me?” He wasn’t being negative or resentful, just curious.

I was five foot six, big for a Fourth Grader. Al was six foot two, might get taller, for sure was going to get more muscular, but was imposing enough just as he was. I stretched up to my maximum height and said, “You’re the only person I know who’s been in fights.”

“Mickey, it’s just Grade School  . . . it’s not Juvie . . . I mean, how rough could it be?”

“Yeah, but I’m the new kid. Nobody knows my big brothers like at North Woods. I’m just this little Fourth grader. There’s gonna be bullies. I’m not afraid of getting in a fight. I’m not afraid of getting hit in the face.”

“Well what are you afraid of then?”

“I don’t wanna look stupid. I don’t wanna look like a fool . . . Are you gonna show me some stuff or not?”

“Alright, alright, don’t get your panties in a wad.” 

Standing on the street somewhere in New York, in the midst of ten drunken Irishmen, I actually thought my Irish accent was pretty good although often when I tried to do different accents, inevitably, they all started sounding kind of Russian.

One of the Irish drunks lurched towards me. I stepped to my right, tripping him, flipping his feet high up in the air, and, with my hand on his butt, drove his face into the pavement. Like dogs seeing a squirrel, all the men jerked and gave me their complete attention, even the man holding the girl. He let her go and she ran, reaching down to pick up her hijab from the pavement. 

I started to back up, holding out my hands, palms up, showing I had no weapons and prepared to run but they’d already surrounded me. This I’d seen in the fannings.

“Where ya off to, country boy?” asked the leader, a compact, thirty-something holding a bottle of what appeared to be Jameson. “Party’s just started.”

No idea what gave him the idea I was a country boy. City boy wouldn’t get involved? “I don’t want any more trouble. How about I just go back the way I came?”

“Oh, I think it’s a little late for that, boyo.”

Growing up Okie, I was kind of an expert on drunks. Generally speaking, there are sloppy drunks, funny drunks, emotional and weepy drunks and there are mean drunks. These guys seemed to be of the latter persuasion. Red took a final pull of the whiskey bottle in his hand and, holding it by the neck, expertly broke off the fat end on the curb, giving him a lethal weapon.

He advanced on me. I jumped sideways, dodging the weapon as he slashed at me. I jumped back but his mate caught me and pushed me back right into the arc of another slash. I got a deep horizontal laceration about ten inches long and about two inches above my left nipple. I didn’t even feel it, but I felt my shirt immediately become soaked with warm blood. He lunged, pointing the bottle like a knife, aiming high, trying to stab me in the face. I stepped in under his lunge, blocking his arm with my arm and poked him hard in his left eye with my thumb. I got pretty good penetration.  He screamed and I kneed him in his groin then his face and, as he was falling backwards, kicked him in the liver as hard as I could. I turned and threw the drunk behind me into another one and took off. There was no pursuit. They were too drunk. Too stunned. Plus two of their number were moaning on the pavement, including their leader, Red.

I ran as fast as I could, turning this way and that, becoming even more lost. Sheer luck I saw an all night clinic a few blocks up ahead . As I walked in they took one look and ushered me to a gurney, pulled the curtains and a twenty-something black woman got my bloody jean jacket and my ruined T-shirt off, got me up on the gurney and immediately put pressure on the still bleeding wound while a thirty-something white guy wheeled over a tray and opened up what I thought was probably a wound pack, a pre-packaged little metal tray with the usual implements to close a wound. No one had said a word.

A middle aged black woman, her long hair tied back, walked over with a clipboard. “Name and birth date, please.” I gave her the fake ID birth date indicating I was nineteen. I looked it and didn’t want to open up a can of worms about treating a minor. Too much complication potential. “Any allergies, are you taking any medications, do you have any health issues with your heart, lungs, liver, kidneys . . .” It was quite a list. I gave all the right answers. I was starting to feel a little light headed. Coming down from my fight or flight, plus, I thought, I’d lost some blood. An older, maybe Hispanic woman arrived and asked me about allergies again with a Spanish accent. Examined my arms, looking for track marks, I assumed. Finding none she looked up and smiled before giving me a shot in my upper arm.

Big city emergency health care, 1966. “That’s for the pain, mijo,” she said, smiled at me again and wrote some things in my chart.

“Muchas gracias,” I said.

A tall, gorgeous young black man came in past the curtain, wearing a long white coat and  proceeded to don procedure gloves. “Any ‘yes’ answers, Carmen?” he asked the woman who’d given me the shot.  His accent identified him as definitely from New York. I hadn’t been there long enough to differentiate the nuances of the different boroughs. Gorgeous doc had a big smile for Carmen who regarded him like a succulent, tasty treat. 

“No, doctor,” she answered worshipfully.

“What’s your name, kid?” I answered him. “I’m gonna clean this wound out and sew you up. Sound ok to you?” A big smile for me.

“Yes, doctor. Absolutely,” I answered worshipfully. I wanted to fit in.

“I know Carmen just asked you but just to make sure . . . any allergies to any local anesthetics?”

“No, doctor.” Again with the worship. I thought, What is it about this guy?

He numbed me, cleaned out the wound and proceeded to sew me up, putting a lot of deep stitches in even before he got to the skin, and humming Uptight (Everything is Alright) to himself the whole time, except when he asked me questions. “How’d this happen?” I told him. “How big was the gang again?” I told him. He shook his head and looked at me dubiously. “Had any other trauma?”

I told him about getting whacked in the head with a baseball bat back in Hillsdale by a guy named Garth and hit in the head with a beer bottle thrown by some redneck outside Oklahoma City. I showed him my bat scar and the relatively fresh wound on the other side of my head. I suddenly thought calling the scar on the right side of my head my “bat scar” funny like “same bat channel” and giggled a little.

The tall, black, beautiful doctor looked at me seriously and asked, “Are you a shit magnet, Michael?” Just before looking back down to my wound he flashed me a smile and I thought I saw a twinkle from his teeth like Tony Curtis in The Great Race (1965). I thought, This guy just exudes charisma. He’s gonna do well in life.

“It seems that way, doesn’t it? I mean, I-I never start anything. It just seems trouble finds me.” I was getting chatty. Probably from that shot of something they’d given me shortly after my arrival. “Oh yeah and my girlfriend and her family were kidnapped a while ago . . . How long you been outta medical school, doc? Do you have a specialty? How long is a Residency?”

The three people around the bed chuckled silently. “Am I asking too many questions? I’m sorry. I’ll shut up . . . Was that Demerol I got just now? I had it before when they stitched up my scalp la-suh . . .  laceration. Boy, that’s a good drug. Fair amount of euphoria. Probably a high abuse potential. Sorry. I’ll shut up . . . I just got to New York two days ago. I rented a dinky little flat in The Village. My landlords seem nice.” I went on like that pretty much the whole time the gorgeous doctor was sewing me up.

They kept me until I could stand up without falling over, about an hour and a half. Then they released me to the wild after I got detailed instructions how to get back to my flat, at which I arrived around 3am. I fell onto the bed and slept for hours. A knock on the door woke me.

“Mikhael. Mikhael O’Taney. It’s Sofia from downstairs? I brought you some bed linens last night but you weren’t here,” she said through the door.

I made it over to the door and, forgetting my bloody mien, let her in. She gasped. 

“Oh, God, Sofia, I’m so sorry. I forgot about the blood. I-I’ll take those.”

She was a pretty, ten-year-old girl with light brown shoulder length pigtails, green eyes, about 5 feet tall. She recovered quickly. New Yorker. “It’s ok, Misha. I’ve seen worse. Let me help you.” The people in the Urgent Care had put my bloody T-shirt in a bag so I was only wearing my bloody jean jacket on top. The bandage on my chest was bloodstained but no fresh blood. It hurt like hell. She helped me out of my jacket and into another T-shirt.

“There, you are much less scary now. Do you have pain pills?” I fished a plastic bag out of my jeans. She got out a pill and filled my canteen from the tap. The water tasted funny but it washed down the Demerol and I sat back down on the bed. “What happened, Misha?” 

I related my story. “Sofia, I know I’m asking a lot but could you keep this a secret. I don’t want your parents to get the wrong idea about me and . . . kick me out.”

“Da, da, da. Of course. Let me make this bed for you.” In the bathroom I changed into non-bloody jeans and Sofia agreed to launder my bloody garments while her parents were busy with the bakery, which was pretty much all the time. I knew all about family run businesses. My parents, on their own, just the two of them, ran the Lamplighter, our bar in Hillsdale, about twenty miles west of Portland.

“You helped that girl, didn’t you?” she said.

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Of course I’ll keep your secret.”

After Sofia left I lay back down and fell asleep again, woke up after dark and was ravenously hungry. I gingerly ventured out making sure I had my bearings at all times and a few blocks away I found an Italian ristorante, Mama Lu’s.