“I’m okay,” I say. “Really.”
Except Numi isn’t buying what I’m selling. He glances at me again as we arrive at our destination: the Pizza Hombres.
It’s a hole-in-the-wall joint, one of many retail establishments that line the street. There is some parking out front. Numi slows his Caddie and waits for an old man to back out, a centimeter at a time. Numi watches him impassively, but I sense his frustration. After all, the old man is costing me valuable time. And time is what I don’t have and Numi knows this.
When the old man has finally backed up and pulled forward, Numi slips into the vacant spot and turns off the ignition. He looks over at me. I still haven’t gotten a full breath and I’m struggling. I hold the handle above to open up my lungs—anything to help get that full gulp of air.
It’s not working.
Panic grips me. I need to breathe. It’s a hell of a shitty feeling knowing that your lungs are progressively getting worse, knowing that someday they are going to shut down completely, that I will undoubtedly suffocate to death.
A helluva shitty feeling.
So now I’m struggling, fighting for air, knowing that I’m gasping, knowing that Numi is close to starting the car up again and taking me to the closest hospital. But I can’t worry about that now. No. I need air. I need to breathe.
Badly.
So I fight. I suck. I force my lungs to work. Nothing’s working.
Numi reaches out, grips my shoulder. “Calm down, brother. It’s going to be okay.”
I nod, still struggling. Can’t speak.
“I’m here, man.”
I keep fighting. Keep gasping. A fish out of water. A drowning man. Same damn thing. I twist slightly in the seat, trying to free up my lungs. My head feels lighter and lighter, now spinning. Numi grips my shoulder tighter, fingers digging.
“It’s okay, boss,” he says. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Numi…”
“Calm down, calm. Breathe, brother.”
“I… can’t… breathe, Numi.”
He squeezes my shoulder tighter and I now see the tears in his eyes. “Yes, you can, cowboy. Just calm down. You’re going to be okay.”
I feel the tears come to my own eyes. They always come when I can’t breathe. Maybe it’s my body weeping for itself, its own demise. Or maybe I’m just a big ol’ baby.
I continue struggling, gripping the bar overhead. Numi continues gripping my shoulder, giving me his strength, willing me to breathe.
And there—finally, finally, mercifully, thankfully—my lungs kick in. Air fills them completely, filling them so full that I don’t want to exhale. I relish the feeling of completeness, loving the air, the oxygen, the life.
Numi’s patting hand turns to a gentle rubbing. Sometimes all I need is one good inhalation. One good lungful.
Welcome to my life.
“You okay, cowboy?” he asks. He still rubs me affectionately, but now I want him to stop. I still struggle with his intimacy, and so I shrug a little and Numi gets the idea. He removes his hand although I see that he’s hurt.
“I’m okay,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Numi finds us a booth as I approach the counter.
The place is bigger than expected, with two pool tables and dozens of old-school arcade games in the back. The cash register is manned by a cute girl who’s probably eighteen or nineteen. There’s a separate bar area to order beer and wine.
I put in an order for a large pizza and two beers and scan the place. There’s someone working in the kitchen, but that seems to be it. I know I’m grasping at straws here. My instincts are off. No doubt because of my time away, or because of my sickness. Probably both. Truth is, I don’t know what to think. So, better to check out everything and decide later what it means.
I pay for the food and the girl gives me one of those little table signs with a number on it and says the pizza will be ready in twenty minutes.
“Did you find the killer, Sherlock?” asks Numi when I sit down and place the number on the corner of the table.
“No, but the pizza will be ready in twenty minutes.”
“Way to go, dynamo. How you feeling?”
“Better.”
Sometimes it’s better for me to not talk about breathing to take my mind off it. To fixate on it can sometimes bring back another episode, and Numi knows this, and so he changes the subject. And the subject he chooses is nearly as bad.
“Tell me about your brother, boss.”
Numi knows he has me for twenty minutes.
“Here?”
“No better place, ace.” He opens his big hands and looks around. “We alone and we waiting for pizza.”
I smile at his slang. “It’s been a long time,” I say, “since I’ve talked about it.”
Numi nods and waits. He stretches out his long legs and sits back. As I speak, he clasps his hands over his flat stomach and closes his eyes the way a dog might. Just enough to relax but not enough to miss anything around him.
And so I tell him, “We were at Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium, waiting for the game to start. I was seventeen and making some money working nights at a warehouse. It was my brother’s birthday and I wanted to do something special for him. My mother was against it from the beginning. Maybe she had gotten a psychic hit or something, who knows. But I talked her into it, reminding her that I was an adult and could watch my nine-year-old brother, Matt. She relented, but not happily.”
I take in a lot of air, ignore my faltering lungs, and continue the story, “I had gotten off work early and picked up my little brother. My brother wore his Dodgers ball cap and a mitt. Matt’s excitement was overflowing.”
Numi nods, his eyes still closed. I pause for a few moments and get my breath.
“But we got to the game way too early. Even too early to catch batting practice. So we decided to take a walk through Elysian Park. It was a beautiful July day, not too hot for once. The plan was to play a little catch and wait for the gates to open.”
I pause in my retelling as the young girl brings us our beers. I rarely drink beer these days. I’m really not supposed to have any alcohol at all. I don’t care. And Numi doesn’t seem to care either, for once. I think he thinks that I might need this beer. So I drink some, spilling only just a little. Since when were beer mugs so damn heavy?
As I think back on that fateful day, I realize I can’t begin to explain to Numi my kid brother’s innocence or capacity to find joy in everything, his complete trust in the world, his forgiving and accepting nature. He was a godsend to my mother, especially after my father’s car accident that left her a single parent.