By M.R. Merris

When you look for meaning
You get confused
— Bukowski

I’D HIT THE STREETS IN NOVEMBER and by frosty, drizzling February the work had dried up. A friend of mine offered me a couple of days work, and the old stomach needed to be filled, so I took it.

I was having bad chest pains four days before I took the job; I thought it was anxiety, that I had to work through it. Two days later, when the chest pains stopped, I went to the VA on Mare Island and had an EKG done and passed, so I didn’t think anything of it.

Working the first day, I felt sick to my stomach; something told me I should go to the ER. My parting word to my friend at the end of that day was to tell him I might not be in the next.

I drove myself to the Kaiser ER and explained to the front desk nurse what was going on. She took a blood sample and did an EKG and told me to take a seat. Fifteen minutes later I was paged to the front desk and put on a gurney; I was on my back for the next two weeks.

They parked me in an examination room and I sat there twirling my thumbs, thinking what in the front yard was going on. A young doctor came in and told me I was having a heart attack, and did I have insurance? I told him I had VA and my doctor was at the Mare Island clinic. He told me I was going to ICU for the night and then to the San Francisco VA the next day to go under the knife.

They wheeled me into the ICU, a big room with beds around a central monitoring station. I was plugged into an IV for blood thinner in my left arm and an emergency IV on my left hand. On my right arm I had an IV, too, for what I don’t know.

Once settled in, I called the people I was staying with and left a message on their answering machine. I left a message on the X’s mobile answering machine and called a couple of friends — answering machines, answering machines, all I got was answering machines. Next day the couple I was staying with visited me in the ICU. The X called and asked if I wanted her to call my folks and I said yes. I told her I was being taken to the VA in San Francisco for surgery that afternoon and she said she and the boys would visit me there.

I was transported to SF via ambulance. As soon as I got there I went straight to the operating room without even checking in. It was 4:30 on a Friday and the OR crew had stayed late so I could go underneath the knife instead of waiting until Monday.

When I got to the table I was nervous and started to question the doctors, crack jokes and talk incessantly, to the point that the head surgeon told me to shut up. When it was over, before I was wheeled out, the doctor looked me in the eye and told me if they’d waited two more hours I would have died.

What did the heart attack mean? I have spent the last four years thinking about it, but have no answer. I was on the streets when I had a heart attack, which must have meant something, right? Like it did when I lost my family and six months later lost my job of 16 years! There must be meaning, I thought, and if I just pray hard and long enough it will come to me.

It never did. No answers came, no thunder was heard, no tears of recognition or grief over some past sins done by or to me. Silence. Papa’s Nada. I find this unacceptable. I expect Bogey to come up to me through the fog, buy me a hamburger and lay it out for me, “This is how to find peace, serenity and compassion, kid.” It hasn’t happen yet.

Hills don’t look like elephants and the message is not below the water line, nor in the white between the words: It is the black words. Sometimes the answer is neither in a burning bush nor in wind. Sometimes things mean what they seem.

M.R. Merris is a Benicia resident, writer and poet. This is the fourth installment in his memoir series.

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