Day 62 - Beautiful Sheet Metal and Curves in the Road

          I went to visit another recruiter today. This one was way over on the west end of town. She indicated on the phone that she had a controller position open so I agreed to see her today. When I got there something seemed amiss right off the bat. First of all I had to fill out an application and some other paperwork before I sat down with the recruiter. They already had all the information they asked for on my résumé so I was a little confused about why they needed to capture it again in a different format. Still I’d already driven all the way across town so I filled out forms without complaint. The other thing that seemed off was that there was quite a parade of candidates going through the reception area, all filling out packets like me, all with appointments at the same time, and all very obviously applying for clerical rather than executive positions.

          When I finally got in to see the recruiter who had called me I found that she didn’t even have a cubicle. Her desk was in the midst of an army of recruiters in a large open space. I sat in a chair next to her desk. Every other place I have been I was at least taken to a conference room for the interview. This was a high volume operation with, as it turned out, low paying positions to offer. The recruiter was happy to tell me that I had excellent credentials and experience and she was sure that she could place me in one of a number of positions they were trying to fill. She then gave me the salary range of the position she was actively working. It was less that a third of what I made last year. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Another colossal waste of my time! What the hell was going on?

          One good thing about this particular appointment—the only good thing—was that the recruiter’s office was right next door to an Aston Martin dealership. I love Aston Martins. I think they are among the most beautiful cars built today. The DB9 model that I would most like to own comes in at around $170,000. Stopping to gaze at the graceful sheet metal and opulent colors was a bittersweet moment. I’m unemployed. If I don’t get something cooking in my job search within a couple of months I’m going to be homeless. Maybe then I’ll be able to run out into the street at stoplights and occasionally polish the windshield of an Aston Martin with a filthy rag while the owner yells obscenities at me from behind the leather clad steering wheel—something to look forward to, huh?

*****

          I got a strange e-mail from an anonymous source while Alicia was off in Florida with Fische. The gist of the e-mail was that Fische had been bragging around the water cooler that, in his opinion, Alicia could be had if a fellow played his cards right. The sender of the e-mail was concerned that Alicia was about to become the victim of blatant sexual harassment and that Fische was exposing the company to a lawsuit.

          There were a number of other employees from our Arkansas facility who also had gone to the open house, mostly sales people and technicians from our service department. These folks came back with stories that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Chief among these was that Alicia had been seen leaving the open house in Fische’s car with her feet sticking out the passenger side window. There was a lot of speculation about how far that particular posture had caused her skirt to ride up and how much of her nether delights were thus exposed to Fische’s view. Another story was that Fische had been seen leaving her hotel room early in the morning wearing the clothes he had been wearing the previous day. Either Fische had been correct in his assessment of Alicia’s availability or Alicia had been an enthusiastic participant in the tryst—seen by her as an essential component of her new career path. This was all new territory for me, certainly not the kind of thing they teach you in business school. Oh how I wish that they had.

Day 61 - Tears and Implants

          I had another downtown interview with yet another recruiter today. I think I am going to stop making appointments with recruiters unless they have a real job order that they are trying to fill. This one was a plump little Asian woman. At least she was dressed smartly. She may have been as smart as she looked, but alas she was another youngster conditioned to become a non-reader by a relentlessly digital world.

Personally, I have trouble operating my cell phone. I think texting is a ridiculous waste of time. I do not Tweet. I don’t post daily updates on my activities on FaceBook or MySpace. These young recruiters, however, adept as they may be at brief, digital communications, can’t be bothered to read the very résumé that made them want to talk to me in the first place. Yet they seem to be thriving while I am unemployed. I guess that ought to tell me something about how useful my focused, linear, and structured mindset is in today’s workplace. The world is a very different place than it used to be when it made sense to me.

*****

          When Fische first met Alicia I didn’t even own a cell phone. Even so, looking back, this is about the time that the world started coming off the tracks for me. I’d like to blame the digitization of social interaction for this, but that’s just because I am digitally disadvantaged. Digital media may be linked in there somewhere, but the reality is much more complicated and sinister.

          To say that Fische was fascinated by Alicia is to make short shrift of what in Fische’s mind at least was about to become one of the great love stories of all time. Fische was smitten, mesmerized, dumbstruck—good for him perhaps at the time because he was thus prevented from declaring himself early and derailing the whole enterprise. Instead of falling to his knees and making a fool of himself, Fische plotted a conquest.

A good marine in all things, even Amor, Fische developed an overall strategy. He did reconnaissance. He requisitioned the necessary supplies and resources. He enlisted troops and reinforcements. He planned a series of small engagements. Then he threw himself into the fray with courage and abandonment.

That Fische eventually succeeded appeared at first to be a testament to his marine training. Nothing else made any sense. Where Alicia was young, pretty, engaging, smart, and sexy, Fische was anything but. He was an aging, paunch ridden, intolerant, bellicose mass of overcompensated insecurities. His grey hair was receding faster than an estuary tide, and his nose, viewed from straight ahead, was the approximate shape of the state of California.

Fische started his campaign by ratcheting up the attentiveness. He became Mr. Sensitivity. He made it a point to stop by Alicia’s desk several times a day whenever he was in town. He inquired after her health, her family, her work, and her aspirations. He traded bits of philosophy and what passed for business acumen. He carefully mixed the personal into the work-related. He maintained an air of propriety in these exchanges while continually testing where the border between that propriety and impropriety might lay, and whether the border might shift as he continued to pitch his subtle woo. He encouraged her to think of him as her mentor, ever willing to guide her through the intricacies of corporate life at Quilnutz.

Alicia ate it up. She wanted a champion. She wanted a lot of guidance and feedback. She had told me as much in our interview. Trouble was I didn’t have near as much time to devote to it as Fische. His title was Director of Executive Administration. You figure out what that’s supposed to mean. To me it meant that Fische’s job was bullshit while I had actual work to do. Alicia had actual work to do too, but Fische was eating up an increasingly unreasonable amount of her time. He was in her office constantly, leaning over her desk, chuckling over some insight or some shared intimacy while he helped himself to a view down her blouse. He came to town more and more often. They started taking their lunches together. What I saw as time spent feeding Fische’s libidinous ego, Alicia saw as career development. She was not being naïve. She was not even innocent, not by a long shot.

Things really came to a head when Alicia had breast augmentation surgery. She actually came to me about this. I guess she felt she had to since, technically at least, she still reported to me. She needed a couple of days off for a medical procedure. I said okay. She told me it was a female problem. I didn’t want to know the details. I said okay again. Then she told me it wasn’t a female problem in the way I’d probably thought, but was in fact breast implants. I was quiet for a long time trying not to let my face twitch, and then I said okay a third time. Then she told me a whole bunch of the details I had been hoping to avoid. Her husband wanted her to get the surgery. She couldn’t understand why, but she was willing to be the trooper, the dutiful wife, and do what she could to keep him happy. By the time she had laid it all out for me I actually felt a little sorry for her.

I have to say that the results were spectacular. I had seen women with boob jobs before, and not been overly impressed. I didn’t really understand what all the commotion was about. I think that my problem was that I had never known a woman in the before-and-after context of breast enhancement. Up until Alicia’s procedure, I had only known after. With Alicia the change was instantaneous and remarkable. She went overnight from merely curvy to full-on voluptuous. I have been a big fan of implants ever since.

The first time Fische saw Alicia after the surgery he left a trail of drool down the hallway. If I thought he spent too much time in her office before the implants, I figured he’d need to pitch a tent in there after. I was wrong. Instead he decided to take her out of town.

He told her he thought it would be a good idea for her to travel to the Florida facility for an open house that they were having. It would give her an opportunity to meet the Florida staff, meet some customers, and get a better idea of how things were done there with an eye to what might be worth incorporating into our processes in Arkansas. Alicia was anxious to go. She thought it would be a big boost to her career. It didn’t seem to register on either her or Fische that she would be leaving right in the middle of month-end closing when I needed her to be accumulating and reconciling the costs in our work-in-process and finished goods inventories—the job I had hired her to do.

I told her she couldn’t go. She went to Fische, and he called me and told me I needed to let her go. I told him I wasn’t against her going, I was only against the timing. He said they couldn’t move the open house to accommodate my closing schedule. I told him it wasn’t my closing schedule, it was the company’s closing schedule and it was the same every month. He told me to get over it. I went to my new boss, the vice president and manager of the division that had been Henry’s company. He was an import from another division of Quilnutz, but one who was at least willing to listen to reason. He called Alicia in to his office to discuss the situation. She came in tears and pitched a serious and unnerving fit about my apparent determination to keep her from developing into a fully realized cost accountant. I could hardly believe my ears. All I wanted her to do was stay in town and do her job.

My boss called Fische to impress upon him the importance of Alicia’s presence for the closing. Fische stood his ground. My boss gave up.

“You need to pick your battles,” he told me. “Fische is a director. You are a division controller. You can’t win.”

I was really beginning to hate working for Quilnutz. I had hoped that they would be more orderly, more logical, more businesslike in their decision-making than Henry had been. I had hoped that the combination of their good business practices and our products would create a synergy that allowed us to meet our potential. I had hoped that my one twelfth share of Henry’s company would grow under Quilnutz’s management into a real stake in my future. Instead I got counterintuitive decisions based on the prurient aspirations of venal and stupid men.

Day 40 - Sport Philandering

          The Cipro doesn’t seem to be having any effect on my infection. I developed a fever over the weekend that hasn’t been diminished at all by the antibiotic. I’ve been in and out of bed all day, napping, pissing, pushing fluids, taking pills. I don’t know why I have to keep dreaming fitfully of work. It seems unfair, now that I’m out of work, to have to keep suffering the indignities and hassles of being at work in my dreams. Why can’t I dream of idyllic tropical islands, graceful sloops, leaping fish, soaring birds, exotic women? I’ve heard that you can actually program yourself to dream of specific things. I made a mental note to myself to study how to do that once I am drug free enough to focus on a topic for more than 15 seconds at a time. Now that I’ve recorded it here it is no longer a mental note is it? A mental note is like Samuel Goldwyn’s infamous verbal contract—‘not worth the paper it’s written on.’ Meanwhile Henry and his antics occupy more of my time now than they did when I was working for him.

          In addition to being a cheat in business, Henry was a cheat at golf and a cheat in his marriage. He was famous for parking his golf cart between himself and the rest of his party and improving his lie by whatever means came easily to hand, usually his foot. It became known as ‘Henry’s foot wedge’ among his familiars. Another irony—Henry was full of them—is that he was actually a pretty good golfer. He didn’t need to cheat, but he couldn’t resist the temptation. After years in his employ I came to realize that Henry was happiest when he thought he was putting one over on someone. He could often expect to get the exact same outcome in a situation by cheating or not cheating, but when he cheated he felt better about himself and his innate shrewdness.

          He didn’t need to cheat on his wife either, not that I’m suggesting anyone does. It’s just that it’s possible to imagine a marriage so cold and loveless that a man (or woman) would seek solace in the arms of someone other than their wedded spouse. Contrary to this vague imagining, Henry’s wife was a lovely, charming, warm, and loyal woman who worshipped him in spite of his many faults. He could not have done better in any universe familiar to me.

Still he was an incorrigible philandering dog—incapable of any kind of faithfulness. It’s not as if he was faced with difficult temptations. It’s not as if comely and affectionate women were throwing themselves at him willy-nilly, overwhelming him with irresistible enchantment. No, Henry was a runner, a chaser, a hound of heroic proportions. Henry would pursue any woman that crossed his path. It mattered not whether they were attractive, beguiling, refined, friendly, or even available. All that mattered was what Henry thought he could get away with.

It often surprised me how unattractive the targets of Henry’s intentions could be and still hold some fascination for him. He once asked a pair of 200 pound lesbians in dirty jeans and flannel shirts to flash him their breasts. He flirted or propositioned women of every station and situation from scullery help to executive, from jailbird to officer of the court. He hit on waitresses, flight attendants, gate agents, secretaries, hostesses, sales clerks, machinists, loan officers, realtors, maids, nurses, welders, accountants, and machinists. He did not seem to care if he failed in the attempt, which often was the case. Rather he would be emboldened and enlivened by a rebuff. When he did succeed it often cost him more than he bargained for.

Once, when his wife was out of town, he took a group of employees out to dinner and then to his house for an evening of serious drinking. This was the same house that my wife later sold for him. It was an $850,000 waterfront showcase that had been built by an architect designer. It was a stunning piece of work and sure to impress the gaggle of factory workers that he had in tow on this particular evening. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what all ensued or even who ended up with whom or how. What I do know is that soon after this little soiree Henry apparently felt compelled to give one of the young women who’d been in the group a brand new, candy-apple red Ford F-150 pick-up truck, complete with leather seats and a bed liner. The ‘gift’ and the circumstances under which it was given were the subject of a great deal of speculation on the plant floor for months to come.

On another instance Henry found himself drawn to the company receptionist who sat behind a high counter at the front door to the plant. He walked up to the counter, pulled out a wad of currency, and began peeling off twenties one at a time, lining them up along the countertop.

“Let me know when I’ve counted off enough,” he said.

“Enough for what?” asked the receptionist.

“For me and you to run off and have ourselves a nooner,” Henry replied.

This particular affront on propriety, manners, sensibility, sensitivity, and good sense lay dormant for two years, seething and festering in the receptionist’s injured heart until she got herself a boyfriend with whom she wanted to buy a house. Then it manifested in the form of a letter, addressed to the company and delivered to me, from the receptionist’s new attorney. The lawyer felt that $40,000 was a sum sufficient to redress the insult. Henry’s attorney, apprised of the circumstances, thought that was cheap.

Day 36 - Trading Catatonia with the IRS

          I had lots of discomfort and lots of blood in my urine today. Thank God for the spanking new bottle of hydrocodone. Kelly Ripa was looking spectacular this morning, but not so good that I didn’t get up and go take a nap in the middle of the show. It takes a little medication for me to get interested in Kelly, but just a little too much and I’m right off her again. There’s a delicate balance involved.

In my wooly youth there was an underground comic I used to enjoy about a bunch of inveterate stoners called “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” At some point they developed a kind of life maxim that was repeated frequently in the comic and eventually became a cult mantra for the times: “Dope gets you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no dope.” Leaving aside the relative truth or fallacy of that particular statement, there is often a relationship between dissimilar objects like dope and money or hydrocodone and Kelly Ripa or drudgery and leisure that needs to be maintained within a narrow range of ratios in order to work at an acceptable level of satisfaction. Now that I’m out of work and having to take medication to moderate my various pains, I’m finding a lot of my ratios are getting out of whack. Hopefully something will happen soon to reestablish some semblance of order and balance.

*****

I owe the IRS a million three?? I guess it could be worse.

I lost ten times that much in my trading account in the last 20 minutes.

          My reveries today went back to Henry and all the abuse and injustice associated with working for him. In spite of his affronts to good manners and decency he was always interesting, especially when considered next to the anal bozos I have worked for since. Henry was a megalomaniacal sociopath, but he was always direct and unapologetic about it. For this reason he was almost entirely predictable. For instance when he stiffed my wife on the $30,000 real estate commission I knew he was going to do it and warned my wife to get a written contract before she set out to sell his house.

“He promised,” she said, and so he did. In the end though, when he betrayed her trust, broke his promise, and cheated her out of her livelihood, it was just ‘bidness.’ It was entirely within the norm of Henry behavior not only to stiff her on the commission, but to be surprised and a little hurt when she got angry about it.

          When Henry said he loved me the day I almost killed him, I have no doubt that he believed it. Henry had no idea what love is, but, to the extent that he was capable of experiencing emotions and affixing labels to them, however bizarre to the rest of us mortals, what he felt for me and my wife was genuine affection. Now that we are not associated with him on a daily basis, he will not ever think of us again unless there is some immediate benefit available to him in the reaching out. When such a situation presents itself to him however, we will be the first people he thinks of. That’s about as much as one can hope for from Henry.

           Henry used to delight in telling people I was the only person on the planet that he trusted enough to grant power of attorney over all his affairs. That he had not actually done so did not trouble him very much, or me either for that matter. He had given me power of attorney over his income tax issues, and probably that was close enough to ‘all his affairs’ for Henry as tax matters occupied a large percentage of his psychic energy. Henry was one of those people who would rather lose a thousand dollars of real money to real crooks than give up a hundred dollars to the IRS. Fortunately for him I was able to pull his fat out of the fire several times when it came to his taxes.

Henry never really appreciated what I actually did for him, but he did appreciate what he thought I did for him, which was keep him from having to pay any taxes. I didn’t really have much to do with that happy state of affairs. The real reason Henry didn’t have to pay any taxes was that he never made any money. He was an appallingly bad businessman—completely clueless in the intricacies of managing his assets to generate profits and positive cash flow. He was however a master of leverage, and what he managed to do was build a huge and precariously balanced house of cards on credit. He was always one deal away from disaster, and he took us all to live with him on the bloody edge of the precipice.

          What I actually did for Henry was not nearly so exciting, but was, at times at least, immensely satisfying. One such occasion had to do with an IRS audit. No one likes to get audited—especially Henry. He was so completely and naturally larcenous at heart that he couldn’t imagine getting through an audit unscathed. In addition to that, he did not trust the IRS or any of the agents in its employ to deal fairly with him—not since he had admitted to a female agent (long before I met him) that he was knocking down cash, and she had the brass to bring him up on charges.

          The real irony in that particular incident was that Henry had admitted to the impropriety, not out of contrition or even because he thought that he was about to be found out, but rather because he believed that the female agent would be so impressed with his resourcefulness and temerity that she would consent to sleep with him. He did it to get laid, but instead he got screwed. That at least was Henry’s take on it. I would love to talk to the agent and hear what she has to say about it. I imagine that it is, for her, a tale that grows larger and sweeter with each telling.

          So when Henry got the notice that he was going to be audited again he rushed down to my office, threw the envelope on my desk, and told me to handle it. Henry did not want to confront or be confronted by anyone from IRS. He just wanted me to make the whole thing go away.

          The auditor turned out to be another woman. I’d dealt with a number of auditors in various capacities at that point in my career. I thought that I was batting a thousand with them. That is most of the audits I’d been involved in had resulted in a ‘no change’ finding, meaning no additional tax due, and those that had not, amounted to not more that a few dollars each—essentially the same result. My opinion of the process and of the agents involved was this: an audit is meant to be fair, and the auditors who conduct them are just regular people trying to do a difficult and tedious job in which they are usually regarded with fear and loathing. Always I had treated the agents and auditors with whom I dealt with consideration and respect. They had done the same with me.

          This new auditor however seemed to be cut from different cloth. She was as unattractive and disagreeable a person as I had ever had to deal with. She was not just unfriendly. She was imperious. She was beyond the reach of such charm as I had managed to develop to that point in my life. She would not be led. She would not be cajoled. She would not be persuaded by reason, logic, or even by beautiful reports. She was a plodder, so I let her plod.

          It took forever. She examined every aspect of our business for the previous three years. She looked at payroll records, bank records, financial statements, invoices, receipts, notices and minutes of the board of directors. If it was on a piece of paper she looked at it. She said not one word about any of it—not to me at any rate. I assumed that she had found nothing to discuss. I knew that our returns were true and complete and supported by the underlying books and records. I knew we were clean as a whistle because it was my job to make sure that we were. That was the only way I was going to keep Henry out of jail, and keeping him out of jail, if you will remember, had been his sole mandate to me.

          Still the agent plodded on, and I began to suspect that she was hiding out with us. She either didn’t want to go back to the office or she didn’t want to start the audit they had scheduled next for her, so she was going to drag our audit out until they reassigned her next job. I couldn’t imagine why else she was taking so long to conduct what should have been a routine examination.

          It took six weeks to get my answer. After an absence of several days the auditor called to tell me she had finished a draft of the final audit report, and wanted to review it with me. We made an appointment for the following day. She showed up in her usual grumpy mood and started off our meeting by telling me that her final additional assessment of tax was going to be $1.3 million. I pretended not to be alarmed, which was actually pretty easy because all of my synapses and all of my vital organs had shut down the second she mentioned $1.3 million. It is an easy matter not to register surprise when you are catatonic.

          She gave me a copy of her report. My immediate plan was to hide in a closet until after closing time, and then to get into my car and drive to Argentina. I didn’t know if the U.S. had an extradition treaty with Argentina or not. It was not a fully developed plan. I looked at the paper she had handed me. It was an IRS form, a fill in the blanks form with spaces for the essential findings, the applicable code sections, the amount of the related assessment, and so forth. I needed to get Henry to sign it to finalize the outcome. The entries on the form were made by hand in a tightly crabbed block print so tiny I needed a magnifying glass to read most of it. I looked at the assessment. $1.3 million is a huge number—maybe not to the investment bankers and Wall Street traders who are largely responsible for our current financial crisis, but then, to Henry and me at any rate, it was an astronomical sum. Henry was going to have a stroke.

I looked at the reason for the assessment. The auditor had asserted that Henry had taken deductions for losses in excess of his basis. I stopped and read that part again. I knew that was wrong. I sat down and waited for my vital organs to reboot. It took several minutes.

          I had set Henry’s company up as what is known as an S Corporation. An S Corporation is a special kind of corporation that is taxed as if it were a partnership. That means that instead of the corporation paying any income tax, the corporation’s income and losses are passed through to the stockholders and reported on their individual tax returns. Henry’s corporation had only spun losses, so Henry, the sole stockholder, had deducted the company’s loss each year from his other income to arrive at the adjusted gross income on his Form 1040. When I say that Henry deducted the losses, I mean of course that I did it for him when I prepared his annual returns.

Now there is a limit to the amount of losses that a stockholder in an S Corporation may take, and that limit is the amount of money the stockholder has actually invested in the company. This is called his basis. The basis is adjusted upwards for any profits passed through to the stockholder and downwards for any distributions of cash or property taken out of the company by the stockholder. The loss deductions taken by the stockholder in total may not exceed the stockholder’s adjusted basis. This sounds complicated but it is actually very simple. It is also something that I took a great deal of care to calculate correctly each year. I knew that the auditor was wrong.

          I went down to the office she was using, and asked to see her calculation of the adjusted basis. As soon as she showed it to me I knew what she had done. She had started with the adjusted basis at the end of the period under audit—a number from which the distributions Henry had taken had already been deducted. Then she deducted the total of all the distributions that Henry had taken. She had in effect reduced his basis twice by his distributions. Her math was wrong. I tried to put on a considered and avuncular air. This is hard to do when your ego is turning cartwheels as if you had just checkmated Bobby Fischer or stripped a basketball from LeBron James. Still, as gently as possible under the circumstances, I pointed out the error in calculation to the auditor.

She didn’t register any surprise or alarm. I suspect that this was because all her vital organs had just shut down. I knew just how she felt. She’d walked in there with a $1.3 million assessment under her belt. She thought she was going to be a big hero back at the office. She thought that she was taking down a big player who’d already copped to a felony evasion charge. Her career was made one minute, and then, thanks to me, in the next minute—not so much.

She sat looking at the offending calculation for about 30 seconds, after which she uttered a single word: “Oh.” Then she packed all her work papers and schedules into her valise and left. I got a ‘no change’ notice the following week. Henry thought that was just as it should be, and he was right.

Day 16 - Breaking Rocks

          The lithotripsy frightened me not at all. In fact I was kind of looking forward to it. It’s an interesting thing, and the place where they do it, the Kidney Stone Center at Memorial Hospital, is a fun place to be. I know this because I’ve already been there twice for lab work and x-rays. Everyone is good-humored and upbeat. They go out of their way to make you feel good. In my experience this kind of thing usually starts with the doctors. If the doctors are good natured, then so is the staff, and by extension the facility.

I like my urologist. He is Indian, but he was born and raised in Texas so he does not have one of those sign-song accents that you think of if you’ve seen too many movies or met some Indian transplants. He is very smart, very young, and very personable. He is too young to be doing what he is doing, but he capitalizes on his youth by being irreverent and taking a conspiratorial tone with his patients. He does not take himself too seriously although he does frequently lecture board certified urologists all over the state and has written some well received papers. He must be serious somewhere, but he is not serious with me and I appreciate it.

The nurses and technicians started flirting with me before I had a chance to flirt with them. I don’t know what’s up with that. I feel like I have a certain responsibility to my nursing staff public in the recovery room, and if these women are going to jump start the process before I even get any drugs into me then I am really going to have to kick out the jambs later. I don’t know if I’m up to the pressure.

They put me in a little dressing room where I have to strip naked and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns that tie up the back. I don’t know how they expect you to get one of those things on properly, but somehow I do. The x-ray tech stuck her hand through the curtain to get my attention, and asked if I need any help getting the thing on. I told her thanks, but the deed was already done.

“Darn,” she said. “I was hoping to get a look at your butt.”

I could scarcely believe what I just heard. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife about this.

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said to the tech, “but you didn’t miss much.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said.

Anyway she took some pictures so the doctor would know where the stones were before he started the procedure. Then she took me to a staging area. I climbed into a rolling bed. They covered me up with a blanket they just got out of a warmer. They started an IV. They took my vitals. They asked me what I wanted to watch on TV while I was waiting. They brought me my wife. We were having a high old time. The nurses were in a party frame of mind. People kept stopping by to visit and ask me questions. I got visits from the surgical nurse, the staging nurse, the recovery room nurse, the nurse anesthetist, the anesthetist, and my urologist.

They all wanted to know pretty much the same stuff: what was I there for, which side kidney were we doing (left or right), had I have anything to eat or drink since midnight, had I had a bowel movement, did I need to go to the bathroom, where do I see myself in 5 years, what are me three best and worst traits and why? I was better at answering some of these questions than others.

Eventually they gave me something in my IV to help me relax. Relax from what I don’t know. This was about the most laid back, non-threatening, friendliest setting I’d ever been in, and the notion that I might require some pharmaceuticals to help me relax is near nonsense. Of course I wasn’t about to protest. I mean really. What harm could it do? Besides I didn’t want to upset the delightful ambiance by protesting.

I woke up in the recovery room. This is the great thing about surgical procedures. You sleep through the traumatic parts and wake up stoned and surrounded by women. I was feeling pretty good. Since there’s no cutting with a lithotripsy there’s no residual pain. The meds are less intense, so you wake up faster.

The procedure had broken up about half the stones in my right kidney. The 14 original stones were evenly distributed throughout both kidneys. The stones at the top of my right kidney have been pulverized into sand, but that sand is still in there and I’m going to have to pass it. To ease this process the doctor has inserted a plastic stint in my ureter—the tube that runs from my kidney down to my bladder. The stint is supposed to keep the sand from getting trapped in the ureter, clogging the works, and causing damage. The stint will stay in for a couple of weeks depending on how fast the sand passes. It may cause some discomfort. I’m to let them know if I have any serious pain. Other than that the doctor was pleased with how many stones he got and my prospects for a quick recovery and transition into the next procedure.

My wife drove me home. We stopped for lunch at a high-priced flatbread pizza place with snooty waitresses and some truly oddball, California inspired, fusion cuisine. It was all health food inspired, heavy on the whole grains and sprouts and such. I guess the idea is that the society matrons and trophy wives who inhabit that particular area of town need food that will help maintain their stick figures to go along with their Botox immobilized faces. My wife hated her food. Mine tasted like cardboard, but I was still a little high and trying not to interject any negativity into the proceedings.