Blood Bank Blues
Viscous veins and the space in between
Article byWill Garrett, art by Isabella Hageman
The blood runs dry in Colorado. Our clients greet us with grunts and graying eyes, barely sticking out the process. They left us with very little. The storage fridge humming in the back of our van looks dismal, only holding a couple of their measly blood bags.
We have to meet a quota for this week’s blood drive. A local high school football team in Denver was supposed to help us out with donations tomorrow but canceled at the last minute, after hearing reports of STDs spreading around the school. Timing could not have been worse. No one ever donates over the holidays, especially Christmas. We are going to have to find over 15 liters of pure red-cell and plasma-filled juice to fill the quota by tomorrow. Driving to Salt Lake City is our only option, since our Red Cross team members have already reserved all the other donation hot spots in Denver. We’re fucked. That’s why this van is doubling its capacity for speed on Interstate 80— not because I’m a criminal yielding massive weapons, or because I’m bored out of my mind, but because I am about to lose my job, and the state sheriffs sure as shit should respect that.
My wife, reflected in one of the back seats through the rear-view mirror, is white-knuckling the edges of the side table above the fridge and trying her best not to throw up.
I try to entertain her. “Honey, why don’t you come up where you can see the road.”
“Nah.”
She shifts in her seat and screws off the top of her Copenhagen Smokeless Tobacco, sticking her fist in for a second (or third) round. Long cut chew. I hate the smell. She does this thing where she sticks a wad on her finger, then rubs it up and down against the edges of her mouth to really get the taste.
“Try to spit nice and clean now,” I chuckle.
“Baby you know I’m a straight shooter.”
The sluice-filled trash can is about five feet away from her. Going for distance, she spits long and high arcs of brown juice. One after another, they land in the trash can. Its murky liquid begins to rise dangerously close to the brim. She goes again, and her saliva catches the window and oozes downwards.
“Janice, I'm getting tired of this game. Come up to the front seat so we can hold hands and look at the view,” I proudly extend my arm towards the flat desert.
She responds with an impressively coarse hawk of spit that splats inches in front of the can. I sigh and tune into the radio. Every station is static. My head is ringing.
“Honey, do you think you could drive now? I’m feeling weird.”
“Sure baby.” She shuffles her feet in the back, then starts tapping the top of the chew container with her finger. “How many people do we have to see today?”
I think for a second. “We need 15 more liters of goddamn blood, so…30 people?”
“You think we can do it?”
“Well, Salt Lake City is a whole ‘nother breed of blood,” I chuckle.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think they’ll all want our money.”
“Oh, so we’re gonna have to pay them now,” she sighs. “We couldn’t even afford to go on vacation this Christmas.”
“No, don’t worry, we won’t have to pay out of our pockets. My boss knows this quota purge will be last minute, so he forked over some rainy-day funds.”
“Thank Jesus-”
“And thank you,” I interject. “For coming with me.”
“Of course. Why the hell are we going to Salt Lake City though?” She tilts her head forward and let another line of spit fly.
“My buddy used to live there, so he knows all the places with potential buyers.”
My wife raises her eyebrow. “Which buddy...”
“Grant.”
No response.
“Babe, this is our only option.”
She stiffens up and keeps silent.
“I know. I know it's messed up. But this is the last time we will resort to his advice.” My head feels hot. The blood quota is hanging above my head all high and dry like an I-80 billboard ad for Jesus.
I keep searching for radio stations. Still no luck. Feeling dizzy, I lean forward towards the windshield and stretch my back with my hands on the wheel. I feel the stress in my neck as my back cracks a couple times.
I lean back and force a smile. “Maybe we will meet another Tom Sater.”
I see her half smirk while looking out the window.
Good old Tom Sater was someone we’d come across in New Orleans on our most successful blood drive. He’d doubled down on the amount we were supposed to get, deciding to donate an entire liter of his blood in one session. Bless his soul. By the end, he was practically staggering down the steps of our van, but he gave us a little wink as he sipped his Sunny-D juice box, sliding us a card to reach him by. He told us that anytime we needed him, he would be of service. We ended up calling him two more times that month, and each time he would give us an entire liter. He was something like a magic faucet from a folktale. By our last session, his skin was rather clammy, but he still straightened up enough to drive out of the parking lot. The world needs more people like him.
“Janice, I feel dizzy.”
“Oh shut up, you’ve been feeling faint for weeks, just get a grip.”
Empty gray land whips past us. My throat is burning like summer asphalt. God, we have to meet how many more people in the next 24 hours? I can’t swallow. I reach for the water bottle next to my seat only to find it empty.
“I’m gonna pull over…”
“Not this shit again.”
The landscape starts slowing down. My head is crackling and straining like a shedding copperhead. I try to speak up, but all that comes out of my mouth is a sort of pathetic high-pitched grumble, which sends her to shits. My tongue sticks to my teeth, then sends jabs toward the top of my throat, causing a shooting pain up to my eyelids, fluttering and pulsing in bursts. Glimpses of red and white, then black. Goddammit.
I finally pull over and everything is fuzzy. My wife slams the door from right outside, but it reverberates a very distant, far-off noise. I try to pinpoint a spot on the heat hazed road, clutching the gear shift in park, trying to stay steady. I’m being shaken by my wife, and when she reaches her hand back behind her head so as to give me a friendly warning, I snap out of it and shove her off.
She stands on the roadside, shaking her head. “Darling, you can’t get ahold of yourself. We’ve got to go to the hospital, we just can’t keep putting up with this.”
Behind deep, controlled breaths, my vision wavers less and less. “I – I…Let’s just, let's just get this final run over with,” I finally let out.
“But baby…”
“Jan, we need this last pick up. Or else we’re nothing.”
“What if you have some crazy disease? Like AIDS, or cancer? You’ve been having these flashes all the time, almost every day this week!”
“Maybe, maybe if you had flashed me once this week, I would feel better.”
“Christopher! Don’t give me that!” She hawks up a glob of brown at my feet. “I agreed to go on this trip with you because I thought it was gonna be fun. I wanted to hike the Rockies with you, maybe take a nice long bike ride. Sleeping in a goddamn blood drive van is not gonna cut it.”
“Honey, I’m sorry, it's just…the Rockies? Have you ever even been on a hike in your life?”
She steps forward towards the door. “Not funny.”
I put my hands up defensively.
She swats them down. “Just get in the back and don’t make a sound. And hand me my whiskey when you’re back there too.” Yanking me out of the driver's seat, she hops in. A car zips past us from the opposite direction, heading directly for the sun.
“Thanks for driving,” I hoist myself into the back seat. “My guess is we should arrive in Salt Lake City in an hour.”
“Just shut the fuck up,” Janice says. She digs into her mouth and throws her wad of slobbery Copenhagen out of the window.
I nod off as we race over the hot straights into the afternoon, occasionally awakened by Jan’s swerving, whipping my head into the window (which I cleaned brown saliva off of with the sleeve of my hoodie). It must have been three hours back there.
The next thing I remember is rolling up to a brightly lit Starbucks drive thru not far from downtown. Janice orders us two regular coffees, no cream or sugar, and a couple of cake pops. I plop one into my mouth and let the dough sit on my tongue, getting all soggy and warm.
“How far from our first house?” she asks.
“Lemme check.”
I had created a map of all the potential blood sellers we could find in the area. Grant, the buddy back home in Denver, had given me some great insight. He told me about this one bender he did when he used to live there, when he found a couple of Mormons who were on a post-High School retreat. He had these two huge Bose speakers strapped to his shoulders like a football player as him and the Mormons ran around the city trying to find trouble. Anyways, the three of them found this one friendly, gray-haired man that night wearing a grunt tee that said, “I find your lack of ammo disturbing.” He led them to all the best apartments. My friend couldn’t remember much of the journey, but he did his best to trace the pilgrimage on a paper napkin for me at a diner. For all the houses with blood donors, he used a sharpie to draw mini leeches next to them, but the leeches looked like squiggly lines which made the map all the more difficult to read. The napkin is a bit smudged now, but it should do.
“Turn left.”
I stand up in the back and start getting things prepped. “I say we start getting blood as soon as we touch down.”
“So what, we just knock on their doors? At 10 in the morning?”
“We don’t have a choice.” I boot up the blood pressure and blood collection monitors.
“How are we gonna know who they are? And if we can ethically use their blood? And what their blood type is?”
“You’re asking too many questions.”
“Honey…”
“Turn left here on Gregson.”
I get the blood collection bags and labels out, along with the blood type testing kits. “We’re gonna have to test for their blood type on site, then draw their blood while we wait for the results. Then we can label everything.”
The van bumps and jostles me to the side. Jan’s trash can flips and out oozes all her brown spit.
“Shit!” Janice yelps. “This road has so many potholes. Where the fuck are we?”
“We’re getting close.”
Passing a row of apartment buildings, I see a man sitting on a shredded couch on the lawn, staring at us and smoking.
“Just a couple more blocks.” I throw a paper towel down over the mess. The van keeps rattling and shaking. I withdraw a gallon of apple cider from the fridge that is sitting next to the blood bags so that the patients have something to drink after donating. I can see some foaming through its wax container. The muddy color of the cider is disturbing. It looks exactly like Janice’s spit. I twist off the cap and take a long swig of it for good luck.
“We’re here! First stop.” On the corner of the street is a three-story apartment building. I make sure all the equipment is safe and ready on the desk across from me, then open the back doors of the van and hop out.
“Wish me luck,” I say, before I close the back doors. My wife helplessly stares at me in the rearview mirror.
As I walk across jagged cracks in the sidewalk, the smell of wet cigarettes hits me immediately. The lights are on in some of the windows of the apartments, but it’s a very quiet morning. I cross the dry, pale lawn, avoiding some broken glass.
Grant called a lot of these people last night and said all had confirmed they’d be willing to sell their blood. They just want to see me first.
I get to the front path, pass by a couple bushes, and open the glass doors into the lobby. There’s no one in the reception area, so I find the stairwell and climb to the top floor. I take out my smudged napkin map. Room 34 it says. I walk quickly to the door and knock.
“Who the hell are you?” someone responds.
“I’m your buddy's friend. You know…the one that called you last night?”
“Oh, right.” I hear footsteps and then the door opens. Greeting me is a man about a head shorter than me, with cowlicked hair and a large, scruffy jacket with a turn down collar. “What can I do you for?”
“Hi! I, um…Would you like to come outside?” I offer, beckoning towards the hallway.
“Hold on,” he demands, making me hold open the door. He turns around towards his kitchen that is overflowing with food-crusted dishes. “I’m looking for my slipper, I swear I just had it.” He wore one slipper, and his other bare foot stuck to the floor and made a sappy sound as it came up with every other step. He saunters around the corner. “Fond it.”
“Great”
“My friends are waking up. They’ll be down in a minute.”
“Swell.”
I lead him away from his apartment and back down the stairs outside towards our van.
“Ok,” I start once we have crossed the pale front lawn. “I just have to ask a few routine questions. Have you had any major surgeries in your health history?”
“No.”
“Have you been traveling recently?”
“No.”
“Any use of drugs or alcohol in the past 24 hours?”
He gives me an ugly wide smile again. “No.”
“Are you on any medications?”
His wrinkled skin and sunburnt eyes answer every question with haste. He seems well-intentioned. My guess is that the guy became unlucky in his years after college. He looks about 40.
“How old are you?”
“25.”
I look up from my chart. “Okay, that’s everything. Stanley, why don’t you come and have a seat over there,” I motion to a cushioned chair in the back of the van. My wife takes one look at him from the rearview mirror and hunches over, covering her face with her hands.
He plops into the chair, shaking the van a bit. He has a rather hunky build. I hop into the van, reaching around him to grab a lancet on the desk.
“Okay Stanley, I’m going to test for your blood type. Just hold out one finger…”
He complies.
“Okay, now take off your jacket, and I’m going to get your arm clean and ready for the blood draw.”
“How much money am I getting again?”
“Please, sir, just take off the jacket. We can discuss this again after.”
“Fine,” he grunts, sitting forward as he zips the front of his jacket down and throws it over the back of his chair. His hairy arms are covered in scratch marks and scabs of different colors and sizes.
“Fuck–” I say, startled.
“Just take my goddamn blood already.”
My wife opens her car door and gets out, walking towards the corner of the street. I see her through the windshield as she furiously packs a chunk of Copenhagen into her mouth. I look to my right side and see a small group of disheveled people tiredly shuffling out of the apartment complex.
“Would you hurry this up?” He demands.
“Yeah, hold on a sec,” I say, gazing back at the impressive number of scars on his skin. I start to feel dizzy.
“Look, it's not that hard,” he says, pointing towards an old needle mark on the inside of his elbow. “Do I have to draw a diagram for you? I assure you, this is a good vein.”
He must see how uneasy I look because he begins chuckling, opening his mouth wide and blasting me with bad breath. I grip the side of the desk, trying to stay stable, and focus my eyes on my wife. She catches my gaze and spurts a repulsive brown river of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk, then leans forward and lets some drip from her lips. I can’t even hear him laughing anymore; my whole body feels red hot. I jump out of the van and feel the apple cider coming up from my stomach, then it escapes. Its brown liquid floods the street, overflowing the sewers, covering the sidewalks and torrenting the whole city.