While I’m outside checking my faucets, I look my Oldsmobile over and wonder was it last year I changed the antifreeze? Back in bed, it strikes me that it’s been three years, so I go out and run the engine and sit in the car with my teeth chattering—it’s thirteen below, geez! And pretty soon the warm air is defrosting the car and I drive over to the hardware section at Safeway and get one of those antifreeze testers with the little balls in it. At four in the morning I’m sitting in my kitchen trying to get it out of the plastic jacket, and it comes out in two parts, with the bulb upside down. No doubt some know-nothing Central American put it in upside down for twenty cents an hour in some slave factory. I know he’s got problems—fact is, I’ve been there and could elucidate his problems—but how about me and my damn antifreeze? I mean, too bad about you, buddy, how about me? And I’m trying to jury-rig it when I realize there is a high potential for breaking the glass and cutting my thumb, and just as that voice that is me, that is always talking to me, my ego, I guess, tells me, “Be careful, Richard, so you don’t cut your thumb”—at that instant, I slice my thumb down to the bone. So the next thing you know I’m driving to the hospital with a towel on my thumb thinking, A minute ago everything was just fine, and now I’m driving myself to the emergency room!

Some other guy comes in with this awful burn because a pressure cooker exploded in his face, and he’s got this receding hairline, and you can see the way the skin is peeled back—poached-looking. The guy’s going to need a hairpiece for sure. A doctor comes out eating a sandwich, and I hear him tell the nurse to set up an I.V. line and start running some Dilaudid for the guy, which he deserves, considering. I would like some for my thumb, but all I get is Novocain, and my doctor says, “You aren’t going to get woozy on me, are you?” I tell him no, I’m not like that, but I have another problem, and he says, “What’s that?” and I tell him I can’t jack off left-handed. Everybody laughs, because it’s the graveyard shift, when that kind of joke is appropriate—even in mixed company. Plus, it’s true.