When Brad wakes up during heart surgery, he thinks of Fork Smeller.
What a shame, Brad cannot squirm or scream. Under the interrogation lights of the operating room, with his chest like a cold-cuts platter, he has no choice but to confront his wrongdoings.
Can you blame the man? The grind of a sternal saw will do that to you.
But know this: Brad’s only doing poorly here, with his innards in the air and his eyes taped shut. In fact, he rolled up to the hospital in a Range Rover, the same luxury car his mother dropped him off in as a seventh grader, to Fork Smeller’s house.
“I can help you,” Fork Smeller had assured Brad, all those decades ago.
The kid’s name was Joel Buckley. He was a good one—curious, intelligent, openhearted. He was even willing to tutor Brad in science. But Brad was a different breed of boy. The kind that played lacrosse and spent his summers at the country club. The kind that bullied kids like Joel, who wore donated khakis and needed a scholarship to attend school.
Boys like Brad were bred to be on top, to sail through life guzzling enough ribeye and porterhouse to end up with a retractor holding the walls of their sternum open.
Brad may be in the throes of hell now, but he wasn’t there in seventh grade, at Joel’s house. He wasn’t there when Joel quickly turned over his latest biology test, so Brad wouldn’t have to see the A in bloody-red ink. He wasn’t there when Joel kindly went to his shitty kitchen to make Brad a study snack, half a box of instant macaroni and cheese.
Joel didn’t know that Brad was watching as he retrieved a fork from the drawer and gave it a harmless sniff before handing it to Brad.
“Thanks, man. I appreciate it,” Brad had said with a handshake before getting chauffeured home, a gesture that led Joel to believe he made a friend.
But at school the next day, the walls of Joel’s heart collapsed when he saw the writing on his locker: FORK SMELLER. His hands shook while entering the cafeteria, as if he was walking the plank—the grins around him like sharks in the water. His brown-bagged lunch crinkled from his sweat.
Brad and his bullies gunned Joel down with their nasty faces, their taunts.
“How does my fork smell?”
“Sniff this, nerd!”
“There’s free detergent at the soup kitchen!”
Surely, Brad’s remembering this right now, with his organs in someone’s hands, a tube down his throat. He must hear the words he incited to the grisly beat of his heart monitor.
What must kill Brad, though, is that Fork Smeller had a spiteless soul. The kid carried on admirably—stoic in the face of torment, aware that he was destined for something bigger. He just had to get there. After excelling through high school, college, and medical school, Fork Smeller paid off his loans, bought his tired parents a sizable condo with central air, and brought up a family with a lovely woman he met during residency. He never spoke a bad word to Brad.
With his hard-earned money, Fork Smeller now enjoys the occasional vacation, and drives a modest car to work. Word also has it that he recently secured a spread in a reputable medical magazine. Would you look at that? Named one of the city’s top doctors.
Anesthesiologist, to be exact.
