A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard Page B

nods. “Okay, sir. Okay. I ain’t even gonna lie to you, sir. I ain’t even gonna lie. I been drinking. Had me two beers.”
    Two beers, incidentally, is the magic number. Every staggering homeless man, every puke-covered lawyer, every passed-out college girl, they all have one thing in common: They’ve had exactly two drinks today.
    Darryl burps, swallows hard. “It’s a weakness, but I’m working on it. I been askin’ the Lord to help me out with it.”
    Tammy’s back. “You better ask the Lord to help you get your stupid ass unnailed from that wall! Otherwise you’ll be stuck here watchin’ me and Todd consummate my new life!”
    And there it is. Tammy has met someone new and wants Darryl gone. Drunk and unable to let go of the skinny-legged, sunburned love of his misguided life, Darryl nailed himself tothe wall. Given the choice between a nail through the elbow and being an unwilling spectator at the Tammy and Todd Show, I’m not sure which I’d choose. If not for us, Darryl, the poor bastard, would’ve gotten both.
    As engrossing as all this is, there’s only one option: Fire up a saw and cut him out. Darryl overhears us talking and starts shaking his head, his voice trembling. “No, sir. No way in hell. You can’t cut this wall. This wall cannot be cut. This wall is like the bond of love, and there ain’t nothin’ can cut through the bond of love!”
    Twenty minutes later, the fire department has cut through the wall. Now we have other problems. Darryl, drunk as hell and suddenly free, is stomping around with a three-foot-by-three-foot section of Sheetrock nailed to his arm. The cops tell him to relax, to sit down and shut up and go to the hospital. “Get that thing off your arm,” they say. “Sober up and sort this out tomorrow.” It’s sensible, but Darryl is in no mood for sensible. The cops are invited, cordially, to suck his dick.
    And here come the cuffs.
    I could have predicted what happens next: Darryl refuses to go peacefully, and Tammy—the woman who threatened to sleep with another man while her nailed-to-the-wall common-law husband watched—experiences a change of heart. She is now Darryl’s defender. She punches a cop.
    When it’s all over and the screaming has stopped, when the clouds of pepper spray have drifted off into the night, the final score looks something like this: Tammy is melting down in the back of a patrol car; two cops, having wandered into the cloud of pepper spray, are crying and staggering around; the neighbors—all black, all amused—have turned out to see whatthe crazy crackers are up to; and Darryl? He’s in the back of our ambulance, the three-foot-by-three-foot section of wall still nailed to his arm. He’s sitting quietly on the stretcher.
    After the door closes, he smiles, crosses his legs like he’s in a lounge chair instead of an ambulance, and shakes his head. He asks me, “You got you a woman?”
    I nod.
    â€œTreat her right, man. Treat her right. Ain’t nothin’ in the world like a good woman. Not a damn thing. And I oughta know. Got me the best one there is.”

16
Accidental Veterinarians
    T hat Darryl makes us laugh, even though it’s at him and not with him, means he’s one of the good guys. For all the nonsense, the yelling, the rolling cloud of pepper spray, it was fun, and as far as I’m concerned, Darryl’s all right. Call any time, brother. But for every Darryl, there are a thousand others who yell, curse, spit, or—just as bad—sit on the floor and demand to be carried down the stairs because they have a cold and we’re here to serve.
    Chris is always saying he prefers dogs to humans. Dogs are loyal, humans are a pain in the ass. I tend to agree. Still, it never occurred to me that I’d be dispatched to save a dog. Until today.
    It’s late June, not even ten in the