touch of Telly

Vicarious. 

It’s the perfect word to describe life in the time of Covid.  While the virus abounds, travel and dining-out is as close as one’s television…if we don’t mind someone else having all the fun.  And those of us following the CDC’s life-preserving guidelines thank God for those who are not.  For these are the people still doing everything we all did a year ago before…you know.  On any given weekend, I will reach out to several such friends, and after a few phone calls, I feel I’ve squeezed enough game nights, weddings, pizza parties, and in-class grade school lessons to fill a month of weekends.

All safely. 

All vicariously.

On this Saturday, I’m attending two parties on the block, less vicariously than distant.  

The first of these events is at Ed Filbert’s house.  Ed lives across the street and a couple houses down from me.  And after he hosted a super-spreader event to celebrate his sixty-eighth birthday, my side of the street is as close as I’m willing to get to the post-event gathering.  Ed and at least twenty of the fifty-some people who attended his party, have tested positive for Covid.  Exactly two weeks later, he is hosting a number of medical providers in astronaut suits.  His infected wife was admitted to the local hospital and given the last of the beds in the area.  Since Ed already has a bed at his home, that is where they are treating him.

I’m just standing on the safe side of the street, minding another person’s business, when a familiar person stops to watch with me.  He, along with most of the grill-masters in this and the adjoining neighborhood, crashed my party-for-two, a few months back, when I couldn’t get the grill lit.

“Hey,” the guy says.  “I remember you.”  He grins.  “I didn’t introduce myself last time.  My name’s John.”

“Juan?” I ask, when his mask filters back key letters.

“John,” he says again.  “As in….”  He looks around us.  “The gospel of John?”

I look around us, wondering where the heck he saw that.  “John.  Hey.  My name’s Loch.  As in the Lochness Monster.”  His brows go up, clearly impressed.

“Who’s the little guy?” he refers to the cat on my shoulder.

“Say hello to Toby.”  They do a quick fist/paw bump.

“How about this other guy?” John asks, referencing the house we’re watching.

“Name’s Ed Filbert.”

“Like the nut?”

I shrug.  “It fits.  But it looks like this party is winding down.  After they carried in the ventilator, people started to leave.”

John frowns.  But I tell him there’s a more happening party happening further up the street.  I invite him to join Toby and me.

Here, again, we find medical personnel, but these are different.  They are not on-hand to minister to or to heal.  These are scientists who have come to investigate why my ninety-two-year-old friend Telly has not gotten sick, even after three weeks playing nursemaid to Scott, his virus-infected son-in-law. 

Telly has suggested that this is the quintessential non-bipartisan stance on anything.  He and Scott sit on opposite sides of the political aisle.  “Perhaps our different worldviews,” he says. “is the ultimate protection against the other party’s illness.”

We find Scott milling about the front yard, recovered after a long bout with Covid, but still a likely carrier of the virus.  His wife, Ally, is wearing surgical scrubs, a mask and rubber gloves so that she can hold his hand.  It’s almost sweet. 

“Hey Ally…Scott,” I call out.  “This is John.”  John waves.  “We thought we would check in on your grandfather and see if the doctors have been able to figure out why he hasn’t gotten sick.”

“They have been in and out of the house this whole week,” Ally says.  “They took so much of his blood in the beginning, they had to let a few days pass before they could take any more.  They think….”

“He is one tough old bastard,” Scott says.  This is, perhaps, the nicest thing I have ever heard Scott say about his grandfather-in-law.

“No,” Ally says.  “I mean, yes, he is tough!  But after the last round of tests, they say they think Grandfather may have a natural immunity to the virus.”

“Do you mean, like…he’s just asymptomatic?” John asks.

No sooner is the question asked than the man himself appears on the front porch.

“Hey, Telly,” John calls.

“Yo, John.”

“Hold on.”  I stop everything.  “You know Telly?”

John shakes his head.  “Who doesn’t know Telly?”

Back to Telly.  “Yo, Loch…Toby.”  We wave to our tough old friend.  “It seems when the doctors gave a shot of my blood to a vial of Covid, none of the virus was left standing.”  He grins, rather pleased with his blood.  Not only can he not catch the virus, but the virus can’t catch him.  “I’m like Teflon.”

“You’re like Teflon, pangolins and bats all rolled into one,” I tell him.

“Did you know that around 500 corona viruses have been found in bats?” John talks like gospel.  

One of the scientists steps from the house and removes his mask within sneezing distance of Telly.  “We found his blood effective at immobilizing or destroying at least twenty of those corona viruses.”

John’s jaw drops.

The cat on my shoulder drops.

“We don’t understand it,” the doctor says.  “We can only confirm what we have found.  Since he can’t carry the virus, he can’t give it to another person.”  The doctor hands Telly a note.  “I’m releasing you to return to normal life with other people.  Congratulations.” 

Telly walks across the yard.  As he is about to pass Scott, the latter steps away from him.

“Why are you doing that?” Ally asks of her husband.  “He took care of you when I couldn’t.”

Scott frowns as he says, “He made me watch CNN for hours on end.”

“Back to normal,” Telly says with a grin and joins us on the sidewalk.

“Telly, why don’t you and John come down to my house so we can celebrate your release with a distant round of coffees?” 

John points to a plastic valve on his mask and pulls out a straw.  Then he pokes the straw through the hole.  “I am so ready to coffee,” he says, turning the drink into a word of action.  “I don’t even have to remove my mask.”

I am impressed.  “Where did you get that?”

“Made it.”

“You made it?”

“John here is quite the entrepreneur,” Telly says as we hit the road.  “He designed, patented and set up a small manufacturing team in one of the empty warehouses downtown.”

John laughs.  “I couldn’t have done it without Telly.”

I turn to the old guy walking between us.  “When did you learn to patent and manufacture?”

“I didn’t.”

“Telly and I were at a coffee shop just before the first lockdown, and the waitress told him he couldn’t remove his mask inside.”

Telly turns to me so I can see his eyes roll.  He explains, “We were supposed to slip one of these bendy straws up through the bottom of the mask and into our mouth.  For anyone with nostrils, that’s an accident waiting to happen.  Of course, this only encouraged all their other customers to take their coffees and go.”

“But not Telly,” John says grandly.  “He pinched a hole in the front of his mask and poked a straw right through it.  Genius.”

“Our friend John took it from there.”

“I call it Poke It In.  They’re selling like hotcakes online.”

“Poke it in?” I repeat after him. 

“Hey,” John says.  “The name is its own direction.”

I ask Telly to let me know the next time he is about to spur entrepreneurial invention. 

“Gladly,” he says, “but that assumes I know what I’m doing when I do it.”  Quite seriously, he explains, “I may have missed a real opportunity to capitalize on my immunity when I was contacted by two of the big vaccine developers.”

“You’re kidding?” John says.

Telly shakes his head.  “At first I thought they wanted to buy some of my blood for testing.”  But, as he explains, they didn’t want to buy his blood.  “They wanted to buy the rights to my blood to stop me from coming up with my own home-brewed concoction and selling it to the public.  They didn’t want any more competition.”

“So you could have made money off of this by doing absolutely nothing,” John summarizes.

“Inspiring yet?” Telly says to me.  “Let’s say I wanted to leave open my options.    Besides, I have this great name if I do decide to market my own home brew: Touch of Telly.”

“Touch of Telly?” we all question.

“People would ask for touch of death if they thought it might save their life.”

As we near my house, the cat on my shoulder cocks his head and lifts an ear.  He hears something.  Soon, we all hear it, an incessant beeping sound.  We follow the sound as far as the sidewalk in front of Ed Filbert’s house.  There are no cars in the driveway.  His medical help has left, for good or just for the moment.  But there is a distinctly alarmed beeping sound coming from deep inside Ed’s house.  The kind of beeping you would expect from a monitor that is alarmed by the thing it is monitoring.

Patient Ed.

“That’s not good,” Telly says.  The three of us look around, but there is no professional help in sight. 

“I’m calling 911,” John says.

“I’ll run get Ally,” I say.  Not only is Ally a nurse, but she has the PEP to grapple with a virus.

“That will take time,” Telly thinks out loud.  “And seconds may count.  Crap.  Ya’ll stay here.”

Without further explanation, Telly goes to the Filberts’ front door and tries the handle.  It opens, as though he were expected.  Without mask or straw, he steps inside and shuts the door. 

“Didn’t you say twenty people caught the virus in that house?” John asks.

“I did.”

I look at John.  John looks at me, and then he looks at Toby.  Toby looks at John who looks at me.  I’m still looking at John.

At some point the beeping ends, but our six eyes are caught in a vicious staring knot.  After a real wrestling effort to disentangle ourselves, a white van with two nurses pulls into the drive.  At the same moment, Telly steps out of the Filbert house and, miraculously, the collective of two men and a cat disengage. 

“He’s upstairs,” Telly tells the nurses as they hurry past him into the house.  He shrugs and rejoins us at the sidewalk. 

“What happened in there?” I ask.  “Is Ed….”  I don’t want to say it.

“No.  Ed’s fine.  But he wasn’t breathing when I went in.  So I just rolled him onto his stomach, reset the machine, and whacked Ed on the back to reset Ed.”

“You saved his life,” John speaks the truth.

Telly makes a disgusted expression.  He has quite a colorful history with the neighborhood’s staunchest Republican.  None of it good. 

“On the wall over his bed is this framed piece of embroidery with a message that was pretty popular a few years ago.”

Not knowing where our friend is going with this, John and I almost look at each other to confirm our mutual confusion when, at the last second, we remember what happened the last time we did that.

“What would Jesus do?”

“Huh?”

“That was the message.  What would Jesus do?  Right over the head of the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real nemesis.”  Telly sighs heavily.  “Alexi kept a note card with that same message tucked into the side of our bathroom mirror.”  The widower of many years looks at us.  “My first day out of quarantine with a signed release to return to normal.  And this is what happens.”  He shakes his head.  “But with a message like that staring me right in the face, I didn’t see that I had a choice.”

No one points out that Telly made his decision to go into the covid trap before he saw the writing on the wall. 

“You did it,” John says. 

I second that.  “You did what Jesus would have done.”

Telly says his godly deed has left him feeling drained and parched.  He turns to me.  “Didn’t you say you were going to treat us to coffee?”

I nod and Toby motions for our friends to follow.  “This way.”

Toby rolls up his fur for the Touch of Telly vaccine.