Take My Pulse

Impulse Checked
Joe Koblenski turned thirty doing what he did every weekend; fishing from the sea wall to keep his mind off ‘It’. After darkness fell he drank beer after beer for the same reason. The dingy bar was the only place he knew he would be left alone. His wife wouldn’t go there even if she wanted to find him and the other regulars stared at their drinks or at the stripper.

A group of young Puerto Ricans were talking and laughing. The blonde dancer was concentrating on them as they looked like they had homes to go to and hadn’t tipped yet. Soon she had several lingering hands pushing dollar bills under her thong as the young men grinned and gestured. The barmaid kicked the Alsatian at her feet in a practised routine and a loud growl maintained order. The young men soon left and the room became quiet. The clients shuffled their feet and lit cigarettes, the blonde clutched her breasts and disappeared behind a curtain, the dog snorted. Joe had one more beer and struggled home to the spare room and just enough sleep for another week removing asbestos to begin. ‘It’ had been kept away for another day.

Fishing, beer, asbestos and thoughts of his wife Maria filled his waking hours. He never dreamed, all desire had been blown away by his addiction. Maria’s face was actually beginning to reflect something like hope after his months of self- anesthetising control. She said that if he was clean when the sentencing came up she would keep their home respectful during his inevitable incarceration. If not, bye- bye birdie.

The asbestos job paid well, blood money some called it. Take the pay home, get enough back for drinks, that was his life. He knew his wife liked it like that. He knew his probation officer wanted it like that. Any deviation and the spinning ‘nothingness’ his imagination had formed all about him, as real as a firing squad, would tear him apart. If he wasn’t mutely poetical he wouldn’t have become a junkie and he wouldn’t have shoved the gun into the guts of the shop manager or into the face of the idiot assistant.

At the trial the judge accepted that the gun hadn’t jammed as the prosecution insisted, that Joseph Koblenski hadn’t intended to fire. Also there was a feeling it that if the assistant hadn’t jumped Joe he wouldn’t have had his jaw broken. The judge said he should expect two to five years in the penitentiary; depending on his keeping off heroin and out of fights. And on the probation report. He had one more month to keep it all at bay.

His life followed this pattern for four more weeks. Ten hour shifts removing asbestos from an old paint manufacturing plant in Port Elizabeth suited his mind set. The gang waiting at the gate for the foreman didn’t change much. There were a few white southerners and young blacks from the Carolinas but most of the men prepared to trust the face masks, air locks and luck were Poles or Serbians. They worked in unofficial groups lead by the one man with a little English. Joe spoke only to Lee from Louisiana whose real home was ‘just a hop skip and a jump from New Orleans’. Joe didn’t need to know the immediate reason why his paradise was no longer accessible – all the men were past or future members of a chain gang. Lee was only 20 and could still smile, Joe was reminded of something in his younger self.

Day after day the crew clambered over machinery; boilers, pumps, fans and electric engines. They relentlessly hacked off the white stuff and sprayed water to keep the dust levels down or knocked the insulation off miles of pipes and girders. At the end of the shift the deadly fibres were bagged and the cleared areas were left as shiny clean as a Gideon’s Bible.

Only rarely did anything happen to break the monotony and Joe thought the work much the same as fishing. It would as dangerous to eat anything that lived in the river opposite Manhattan as to breathe in asbestos but crucially both activities filled his mind blotting out thoughts of the heroin that could still ruin him.

However one day Lee got into a shouting match with a tall black ex -marine also called Lee. First one and then the other snatched off their masks and started punching hard raising a dense storm of asbestos dust. One of the foremen walked by and shouted unintelligibly from a safe distance and from behind his mask. Aware of how anything he did would feature in his probation report Joe countered an impulse to intervene to limit the harm. All work stopped as the crew began to separate into racial groups. Eventually the Lees just got up and walked out and did not return. The only comment ever made was to wonder what the Hell anybody forced into this line of work could possibly have left in his life worth fighting for. Joe wept but couldn’t understand why.

That night in the bar he felt uneasy, the next day he was to receive his sentence. He felt the need to make some gesture of farewell to mark his passing. He tipped the dancer, hand to hand, and she smiled at his innocence or consideration. Settling back onto the barstool he self-consciously glanced around. Behind the barmaid was a mirror and in it he noticed an old man at the opposite end of the bar. He was shocked. What a way to end up. The wrinkled, drunk and haggard man sat gazing at the stripper’s breasts having wasted the life his mother’s had nurtured. It was clear from his eyes, vacant beyond caring, that this was as desperate a state as a man can descend to. Joe remembered his own father, a man of some standing in the small Pennsylvanian town he grew up in, now as far away as a myth. What a contrast the two men made. Out of sympathy, out of simple human sympathy Joe caught the old man’s eye and raised a hand in acknowledgment. So did the man in the mirror. Then the full horror of his life struck Joe like a bullet in the forehead. There was no other man.

Joe vomited and was thrown out of the strip bar. On the cold sidewalk he felt weird, as if scabs were falling from his brain. He stared for maybe several minutes through the rain at a streetlamp as if it were the manifestation of an angel. He felt himself to be in a different world. The dizziness passed and, on impulse, he walked into a nearby White Castle Burger bar as if stepping inside a church. He noticed the people about him, he thought about them. He liked them. This was new. Even more – he began to like himself. The heroin had capitulated, had deliberately thrown away its purchase on his life by showing him in a last burst of power the dead heart of its subjects.

Joe was sentenced to five years, four suspended.

“Feel my pulse” Maria said as she held her wrist up to the small hole in the partition which was as near as they could get to each other, “Take my pulse as a token of my heart, yours forever.”