#1
"Fuck you! I ain’t coming out!" I screamed with my little infant mouth from the other side of my mother’s belly. "Put all the drops you want in her nose, you ain’t gettin’ me outta here!"
Well, what did you expect? It was cold the day I was born! In fact, January 24, 1977, once held the record in Georgia for the coldest day in the history of January 24ths. There was an ice storm going on, for chrissake—and I’m not sure if you remember what it’s like in a womb, but if you don’t, it’s a heck of a lot warmer than a damn ice storm.
So I stood fast. I planted my feet, grabbed on tight, and turned blue in the face. And the arms. And the legs, chest, and every other little place that should have been bright pink. In fact, when the doctors and nurses finally got me the heck out of there, they found a thirteen-pound baby who was one white hat and a cute song away from being a Smurf.
At the time they had no idea what was wrong with me, mostly because the Internet hadn’t become a widely used tool for the common human, so they couldn’t visit my website and see how stubborn I really am. They sat there and scratched their heads and muttered a little and finally decided that, whatever was causing it, it definitely wasn’t a positive thing. So they decided to just go nuts.
According to my mother, they began preparations to fly me via helicopter to Houston to the best neonatal cardiac care unit in the nation. That would have been ultra-cool, honestly, as I’ve never been in a helicopter in my life, and if they’d done that, I wouldn’t be able to say that. Not only because I would have been on a helicopter but also because I most definitely would have died, since my blue hue had nothing to do with my heart.
They put both my mother and me in a screaming ambulance flying west from South DeKalb Medical Center in Decatur to Grady Memorial in Atlanta, the two of us surrounded by twelve cardiac specialists, neonatal specialists, and assistants to the specialists. While in transit to Grady, a very sharp young doctor named Janet decided—against all conventional medical wisdom—to ask my mother a few questions.
You see, my mother had prenatal pneumonia. Because of this, her little unborn Smurf had lungs that were filled with fluid. From those rather morbid discussions that always seem to come up in high school biology involving drowning and suffocation, we all know that when the lungs can’t get oxygen, the blood can’t get oxygen, and when the blood has no oxygen, it turns blue.
So we arrived at Grady with a whole new course of action—get the Smurf into the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Only, there was trouble at the door. You see, I come from a very long line of smart-asses. My mother? She’s a smart-ass. And her father? Yep: a smart-ass. There had obviously been some argument over what this new addition to the family was going to be named.
My mother really liked William Joseph as a name. My birth father wanted me to be a "junior" (which baffles me, given that he didn’t even like me all that much), so he was pushing for Randal Joseph, Jr. My grandfather, he didn’t like any of it except for Joseph. So, while my mother and birth father gave my name as William Joseph at South DeKalb, my grandfather—who sped over to Grady to jump-start the check-in process—checked me in as Haud Nom Bar Joseph.
Which, in Hebrew, apparently means No Name But Joseph.
Great, Granddad. Name your grandson Anonymous. That’s freakin’ brilliant. It helped when they were trying to label the charts, and it really made getting me through the door super-simple.
The doctors rushed this anonymous Smurf down a hallway while taking my poor mother into another room. She had no idea that, while he was being wheeled down the hallway en route to the NICU, her brand-new baby’s brand-new heart stopped making brand-new beats.
And there you go. Inside of an hour of being born, this Peacock was no more.
They revived me and stuck me in a room that would end up costing my parents somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars a day to house me (I was pretty young, so I don’t remember what the strippers looked like or what brand of champagne they served in that room). It was about four days of intensive care later before my mom could even come in and see me—during which time my heart managed to stop beating four more times. When she was finally able to see me, she had to put her hands in these huge robot-looking gloves to pick me up.
When she did, she somehow ripped the IV out of my head, causing a small dent and a bald spot on my head that persists to this day (and let me tell you, the only thing more fun than going through middle school with a haircut mandated by my father that showed off my dented-in bald spot was trying to tell this story without having the other kids say, "Man, too bad you survived"). And why would I have an IV in my head? Well, they put the IV in my wrist, and in some sort of fit, I kicked it, and it pierced my skin. The puncture wound didn’t simply heal up, however—it formed a small flap of skin over another layer of skin, such that there is a hole in my right wrist that served as a constant source of entertainment through my teen years when I shoved nails and body jewelry through it and freaked everyone out. So I have two everlasting scars to remind me of the first through fourth times I almost died.
If that weren’t enough, after they drained my lungs, I ended up developing jaundice, turning from blue to yellow and confusing just about every LSD experimenter in the building. This caused me to move from living on a respiratory machine and a feeding tube to living under a black light for a few days. Once that was done, I developed an infection in my navel, which had to be cleaned out nearly hourly lest I become septic.
Every time they’d call my mom and say, "You can take him home now," she’d show up to find the doctors laughing and saying, "Just kidding, he’s got something else wrong with him!"
Finally, I gave up and accepted the fact that I was going to end up staying here on earth. I spent a total of fourteen days in the NICU, running up nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in hospital bills (which, adjusted for inflation, ends up being nearly a million dollars).
And you thought this book was expensive.
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