Excerpt from The Village People’s Voice
When veteran Detroit Lions cornerback Lincoln Archer lost his mind, the world witnessed the spectacle live. The stage: the NFL Wild Card playoff game in Detroit. Ford Field was packed sixty-thousand strong, standing room for frothing fans only. The frigid field turf was so hard, permafrost would have been a more apropos label. Steam rose off the massive football players like human exhaust. The final seconds of the third quarter ticked down. In the stands, the cessation of alcohol sales drew grumbles. Detroit lined up for a final play. The stadium went silent. Spectators gaped open-mouthed, horrified as two helmets collided with such ferocity that the announcers swore they saw the blast radius extend into the cheap seats. The audible sounds of bones breaking, cartilage pounded into paste, a yowl of elemental pain rose up.
The media was triggered by the sound and sight of blood, of damaged men wearing their game face over their pain face. I absorbed the horror in slow motion but felt their pain in real time: sharp and violent like the crack of a shotgun distorted by distance. Eventually, when the play was no longer considered news, ESPN picked up the coverage. Two players went down. Lincoln Archer stayed down. The television broadcast cut to commercials while the team doctors rushed the field. The rest of us saw commercials pitching fancy blenders, canine deodorant, and new cars that drove themselves. By the time the game resumed, paramedics were driving an immobilized Lincoln Archer off the field in an ambulance. He did not grace his fans with a hero’s thumbs up. No wave to cement his status as the gridiron soldier who would be back stronger than before. That was the final image the public saw of Lincoln Archer for three years. Archer’s family kept his health a closely guarded secret. The sports rumor mill constantly jonesed for more grist. There were worst-case whispers of quadriplegia, brain damage, multiple head injuries, or something new caused by a lifetime of concussions now called walking CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The only way to know for certain was to biopsy Archer’s brain and he would have to be dead for that to work.
Then, the inexplicable, or miraculous, depending on your cosmological point-of-view. Three years out of the limelight, Archer rematerialized in a Superbowl commercial as the spokesman for Little Caesar’s Pizza. His speech was slow, and his voice quaked with apprehension, but he was smiling. The world was wowed and gave him a metaphorical fist bump on his shoulder. I wondered how Archer felt in that moment, the time of his triumphal re-introduction to the world. The commercial showed him seated. There was no footage of him walking or running. No slick video montage from his glory days. The commercial left people talking about his reappearance, thrilled he was alive and ambulatory but accepting that his playing days were over.
His presence alone was enough to sell pizza to the masses. The rumor mill spooled up, spinning imaginative yarns speculating that Archer was the first recipient of neuro nano byte therapy that rapidly repaired his synapses. That his supermodel wife had spirited him to a faraway tropical island for a mental, physical, and spiritual cleanse involving chakra crystals and seaweed tape. I threw up in my mouth upon hearing this. Some instigator on sports radio wondered if voodoo dolls could work in reverse to cure someone (no, it turned out his injuries needed to be voodoo induced to work). Finally, after weeks of imaginative speculation, Archer’s wife took to YouTube to announce her husband had been and would continue to receive treatment for a traumatic brain injury at The Oppenheimer Rehabilitation Campus. For the foreseeable future. Wearing a black mourning dress, black hat, and a sheer veil, she did not take questions. Nor would she in the future.
Even if the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Archer exercised her right to remain silent, my editor was a savvy, well-connected woman who scored an interview for me with both Lincoln Archer and his rehab doctor–Dr. Miles Oppenheimer–the founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Medical Officer of The Oppenheimer Rehabilitation Campus. Thankfully, they were all embodied in the same person. Could a doctor both do no harm and be a businessman, I wondered idly.
Parson’s Island was cloaked in morning fog. Across the strait, I waited patiently in my rusty Hyundai for the ferry. Barely seven am, my brain felt like I was still in bed. When the ferry materialized, the pilot was its only occupant. The sounds echoing off the lake grew louder as the fog lifted. The cacophonous rage of sea gulls dogfighting over a blue gill. The splashes of greenish-blue water as the wily walleye, haughty trout, and large-mouthed bass breached the surface of the water separating Parson’s Island and Canada. Straddling the invisible border between the United States and Canada, the island was an hour north of Detroit and an ecosystem away. Wetlands rather than factories thrived here. When the ferry’s ramp hit the pavement, I thrust my groaning Hyundai into gear and lurched onto the ramp. A fiery spark announced my presence as my muffler, suspended by two twisted metal clothes hangers, bounced off the metal ramp. The pilot looked exhausted. Not seeing any harm in me, he squared his shoulders to our destination, lit a cigarette from the one he’d already been smoking, and shoved off.
Daybreak unfolded for some, shattered for others. Last night’s party people on their island properties were policing empty beer cans littering the ground from all of yesterday’s parties. Kids, too rambunctious for my taste, oblivious to the raging hangovers plaguing their parents, yapped and babbled their nonsensical way out of bed, hollering for breakfast and pleading for the freedom to hang out with their new summer friends. Mom and Dad quickly succumbed to the hair of the dog, mixing screwdrivers with metaphors, heavy on the screw, just a splash of OJ. As the morning mist began to evaporate, fishing boats and pleasure crafts at anchor revealed themselves. Low and wraith-like riding the purple line of the morning horizon, freighters began to stack up in the shipping lanes, waiting for the greenlight.
“Hey!” The voice behind me combined the deep tonal quality of Barry White with the disturbingly timid volume of a child. Like a dainty baritone.
I turned around and found myself staring at the bottom of a Detroit Lions jersey. An elephantine hand thrust down from the clouds and shook mine vigorously. “Lincoln Archer.” He was nearly twice my height and stacked in a triangle of muscle. He had maintained his physique in rehab. “You’re–.” He broke off, his eyes darting to the left and then over his palms, where he found the answer. “Drew!”
“Honored to meet you, Lincoln.” We shook hands. I tried not to wince when he gave me the alpha male, boulder-crumbling squeeze. When he released me, blood rushed back into my hand, followed by pins and needles as my nerves restarted. Nothing seemed broken.
“Dr. Oppenheimer asked me to pick you up. Tours are part of my job,” Archer spoke purposefully now, as if he’d rehearsed the lines. Uncomfortable, maybe, because the words weren’t his own. He wanted to demonstrate that he was more than a patient here; he was special, he was invincible, as much here as he was on the field. He wore a name tag.
“I didn’t realize that you were on staff here,” I replied, curious. “What do they have you doing besides tours?”
“Everyone calls me the marketing guy. But it’s not like the Little Caesar’s commercial. That paid bank. Here, I make minimum wage because I’m also a client. That’s what they called patients here. Kind of like the hair club guy. I’m not just the founder; I’m a customer too. They gave me some sweet business cards though.” There were no expressions on his face, noz change of tone or volume in his voice. He seemed cognizant of his storied career, but not its causal role in his downfall. Then he asked me, “Why was it acceptable for a man with a $150 million five-year contract to work a minimum wage job?”
“That would require some ‘splaining. Dr. Oppenheimer should probably be the one to answer that,” I assured him.
In the meantime, Lincoln caught me up on his life post-football. “Since my head injury, I’ve spent most of my time here. Working on Lincoln Archer. On trying to become the man I used to be, the guy everybody wanted around.” Archer paused; his face suspended in a caricature of concentration. I sensed in that moment, when he was lost deep inside himself, that Lincoln was reliving the final concussion. Whether it was a daydream or a hallucination, he quickly returned to reality.
“I help Dr. Oppenheimer bring in new clients.” Archer flashed a self-deprecating, $150 million-dollar grin. “I help other people with head injuries find their way here. Mostly, that involves meeting them and their case managers and giving them a tour from my perspective as a client. Sometimes I meet them in their homes or in the hospital. I tell them what The Campus did for my life and how the therapists here brought me back from the brink.”
Parson’s Island was divided in three sections. The closest to the ferry was a quaint hamlet called Bonnie Brae, chock full of kitschy antique stores, a used books store so small it might have been a closet, a sleepy tavern that stopped serving alcohol at nine on the nose, and not much else. This was colloquially referred to as “the town.” The second third of the island was entirely fenced off from the rest of the island because it housed an exclusive “one-percenter club” with deep berths for mega yachts-a-plenty, a hele-pad with spares for spending the night, eighteen holes of golf, verboten to those whose interest-only income wealth did not exceed seven figures. They had horses, too. I was later informed in the most strident terms that the resort couldn’t put on a happy face without happy members. Translated from its original snooty, that meant to keep your sub-human people away from our elite guests. The final third of Parson’s Island was occupied by The Oppenheimer Rehabilitation Campus, which was hidden from the rest of the island by aging maples, oaks, and cottonwoods. A sixteen-foot-tall fence surrounded the entire campus with only secure entrances and exits. That was probably the easiest way to keep their patients from running away, I thought.
Archer explained to me that patients are called clients here because it makes them feel like they have more control over the rehab process. Most clients were admitted because they were the organic element in a motor vehicle accident; or had fallen down the stairs, suffered massive strokes or, say, became concussed following a sports-related injury from a head-to-something-rock-hard impact. The rehab nut was too big to crack alone. For ninety percent of people living with untreated head injuries, most received perfunctory cognitive testing and a stern warning to watch for symptoms. People who suffer head injuries in the state of Michigan are entitled to full rehabilitation and everything that could possibly mean. From room and board, medical services, psychological and behavioral services, prescription medications, hippotherapy and so much more. Neuro rehab was a rapidly advancing science. Rather than get treatment a la cart, these patients took every therapy in the book as required: physical, occupational, vocational, cognitive, pet, music, art, and even recreational therapy. No questions asked. These benefits were intended to become habits lasting a lifetime or until the client recovered sufficiently to resume an objectively functional, purposeful version of life.
Prior to this practically utopian law passing, people with traumatic brain injuries generally fell through the cracks in the system. Some people with minor injuries healed quickly. Generally, these are the people The Campus uses to share positive outcomes with the public. Like when famous fully recovers two weeks after being diagnosed. More likely, people got the medico-legal shaft before they’re left behind, abandoned in favor of patients who could recover. The walking TBI’s would be left on the street to suffer exposure, pain, humiliation, ridicule, rape, starvation, rats and roaches. The longer they were away from their former lives, the less the real world looked like “the community.” They could be branded psychotic or homeless. There was no telling the difference. Most doctors did not even recognize them as brain injured. They were handicapped but could cause undue bodily harm. There were vagabonds, hobos, ghosts of the penal system too. I realized my own train-of-thought had derailed. But I had no cause to be embarrassed in front of Archer. His was a guileless existence now.
“What made you want to work where you rehabbed?” I queried Archer.
“Oh, I’m a client first.” Gratitude and pride announced themselves in his voice. “And I know the truth about The Campus. Shit the doctors here don’t even know.” He nodded sagaciously.
A client, as I was reminded each time I referred to them as patients, was what the staff called the patients. This was a gift of respect given automatically as the clinicians intended the clients to finish their rehab with a semblance of self-respect. The rationale went that they would be more manageable, calmer, if they were given a modicum of respect. Hence, the grand appellation…client. The title “patient” was saturated in negative connotations as Mrs. Butterworth’ Syrup was with sugar. A client was master of his own destiny. A patient haunted waiting rooms looking like a dehydrated fern. A client expected providers to be punctual. A patient was a subject pretending to be an object. A client automatically received deference. Unless physical or chemical restraints were required. Then, decorum went out of the window, and it was all panic, elbows, asses, gnashing teeth, and pants-shitting. Money was never an object to a client – yet they always wanted more. Minor but critical distinction: unlike a customer or patient, a client wasn’t always right nor automatically placated by mild sedatives. They were subject to further chemical intervention or corrective behavior just like everyone else who refused to accommodate reality.
“Doc Opp tells me you’re a writer. You ever write about me?” Archer asked, curious if he was remembered in the sports world.
“Not in a few years,” I grinned. “But I think I can work you into this article.” I smiled, knowing his name would be the entire reason people would gravitate to my upcoming article. He’d be in the subhead at the very least.
“I’ve been journaling as part of my therapy.” Lincoln warmed up to the subject. “Writing about yourself is harder than I thought. Still, how cool would it be if I wrote a book?” He smiled ear to ear and giggled just as my asthmatic Hyundai coughed its way into The Campus parking lot. I wondered why no one had given the celebrity football player a book or movie deal. “Park next to the golf carts,” Archer directed me through the baroque wrought iron gates and into a parking lot filled with charging golf carts. “We only use golf carts beyond this point. Better for the planet,” He explained. A moment later it was Archer’s turn at the wheel. I won’t tell you that I was pleased by this development. He went pedal to the metal. Before dropping me off at the Administration building, Lincoln inquired, “Do you have a business card?” I was so thrilled that the Lincoln Archer had asked for a card from little old me that I didn’t ask him why. I handed over a faded card with bent, frayed corners from spending too much time in my wallet. Would he ever call me? I wondered like a twitterpated schoolgirl, but for very different reasons.
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About the Author
Drew Bufalini has been writing professionally for roughly two hundred years. Mostly as an advertising copywriter. He has imagined, and brought to life, campaigns for many well-known national brands (portfolio: www.drewbufalini.com). He has also published short fiction in Medium, Freedom Fiction Journal, Bristol Noir, Literary Heist, Gargoyle Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Literary Yard, Aoide Magazine, and Close to the Bone, among others. Drew is disabled and lives with his wife and puppies outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan.