Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page A

satisfying about harmonizing with a sibling. We’ve gotten to where we communicate through music, using guitars the way fathers and sons use baseball, as a kind of emotional code. Worth is seven years older than I am, an age difference that can make brothers strangers. I’m fairly sure the first time he ever felt we had anything to talk about was the day he caught me in his basement bedroom at our old house in Indiana, trying to teach myself how to play “Radio Free Europe” on a black Telecaster he’d forbidden me to touch.
    The song I had asked for, “Is It All Over,” was not a typical Moviegoers song. It was simpler and more earnest than the infectious pop-rock they made their specialty. The changes were still unfamiliar to the rest of the band, and Worth had been about to lead them through the first verse, had just leaned forward to sing the opening lines—“Is it all over? I’m scanning the paper / For someone to replace her”—when a surge of electricity arced through his body, magnetizing the mike to his chest like a tiny but obstinate missile, searing the first string and fret into his palm, and stopping his heart. He fell backward and crashed, already dying.
    Possibly you know most of this already. I got many of my details from a common source, an episode of Rescue 911 (the reality show hosted by William Shatner) that aired about six months after the accident. My brother played himself in the dramatization, which was amusing for him, since he has no memory whatsoever of the real event. For the rest of us, his family and friends, the segment is hard to watch.
    The story Shatner tells, which ends at the moment we learned that my brother would live, is different from the story I know. But his version offers a useful reminder of the danger, where medical emergencies are involved, of talking too much about “miracles.” Not to knock the word—the staff at Humana Hospital in Lexington called my brother’s case “miraculous,” and they’ve seen any number of horrifying accidents and inexplicable recoveries—but it tends to obscure the human skill and coolheadedness that go into saving somebody’s life. I think of Liam, my brother’s best friend and bandmate, who managed not to fall apart while he cradled Worth in his arms until help arrived, and who’d warned him when the band first started practicing to put on his Chuck Taylors, the rubber soles of which were the only thing that kept him from being zapped into a more permanent fate than the one he did endure. I think of Captain Clarence Jones, the fireman and paramedic who brought Worth back to life, strangely with two hundred joules of pure electric shock (and who later responded to my grandmother’s effusive thanks by giving all the credit to the Lord). Without people like these and doubtless others whom I never met and Shatner didn’t mention, there would have been no miracle.
    It was afternoon when I heard about the accident from my father, who called and told me flatly that my brother had been “hurt.” I asked if Worth would live, and there was a nauseating pause before his “I don’t know.” I got in the car and drove from Tennessee to Lexington, making the five-hour trip in about three and a half hours. In the hospital parking lot I was met by two of my uncles on my mother’s side, fraternal twins, both of them Lexington businessmen. They escorted me up to the ICU and, in the elevator, filled me in on Worth’s condition, explaining that he’d flatlined five times in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart locked in something that Captain Jones, in his interview for Rescue 911 , diagnosed as “asystole,” which Jones described as “just another death-producing rhythm.” As I took him to mean, my brother’s pulse had been almost one continuous beat, like a drumroll, but feeble, not actually sending the blood anywhere. By the time I showed up, his heart was at least beating on its own power, but a machine was doing all