Ms. Manners

I’m in the physical therapy room and doing knee lifts, two, three, four. My left knee says “nothing to this,” my right knee says “are you kidding?” I hear a bellowing noise ringing through the whole room and I ask my therapist, “what’s that?” He said, “a patient.” I say, “what’s it about?” He said, “he’s in pain.” “Oh,” I say.

Soon his wheel chair is rolled to a position opposite me. His wife following has seated herself next to him. Two very skinny nurses are urging him to get up from his seat and while they help him he’s howling: “You’re dropping me. I can’t. I won’t. Leave me alone.” He is really a big fella, I’d say late 50’s, with an enormous face with an enormous voice coming out of that face. The nurses are murmuring, “we’ve got you, you’re safe, we’ve got you, you won’t fall” and he’s overruling and overriding it with his bellows of “you’re hurting me.” His wife put out a little finger to smooth his pajama bottom and he howls: “Don’t you fucking touch me. Keep your fucking hands to yourself.”

I was so enraged at his abuse to his cowed wife that I heard my voice bellowing out at him: “You  shutup. You cut that out. Don’t you talk like that. I’m in this room with you and I don’t have to listen to it.” We both stare at each other. Nobody more surprised than myself and I drop my eyes to my knee, two, three, four. It’s not the cussing that was offensive. It was his meanness to his wife.

The man was a F - - - ing bully.

---Florence

Comments

[Sara]

Good for you for sticking up for the wife! Maybe while he's in rehab she'll figure out that life is more pleasant without him and do something about it.
Sara

[Peter Byrne]

Florence, you've found a great plot for your first noir. The fact that you read an orange crate of paperback detective-mysteries is paying off. You've set up a Mr. Nasty and no reader will mind him getting whacked. He deserves it. But who-done-it? I'd check out that nicey-nice wife of his and his stock portfolio. But the tiny bookish woman sharing his space should be investigated too. Didn't she once assault him verbally? There's a great literary tradition of disabled villains. Remember Old Blind Pew in Treasure Island. There was also that vicious guy with a white cane in Luis Bunuel's Los Olivados. In Hitchcock's Rear Window Jimmy Stewart was in the wheelchair (a photographer--or half-villain) but the type he peeps at is your Mr. Nasty. Then there's Charles Dickens....But I've given you enough to get start. Now pick up the ball and run --whoops, sorry. Peter

[john c]

BRAVO!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Joan Herczeg]

Good for you! The bully's wife and the nurses must have loved it!

Jonathan is running the Marathon tomorrow.
He says you'll always be a character.

See you soon.
Love,Jonathan
Joan and Steve