Today I had to get my cast changed. I took the bus to Kaiser, riding in a backwards-seat next to an old woman who hadn’t bathed since shortly after birth. Happily, my favorite cast tech in the world was working today — the one who enlightened me, a broken foot or two ago, about the existence of cast fetishists. “Just look it up on the Web,” he told me. And there it was, all over the place.
R is not your garden-variety technician. He’s also something of a Fiberglas artist, and probably the bane of Kaiser’s existence. To make my cast he went through two rolls of white Fiberglas, four of the colored ones, a six-inch Ace bandage and an X-Acto knife. As he created his masterpiece he told me about his younger days (about ten minutes ago; he’s twenty-seven) when he used to deal drugs. Nudging the air with his elbow, he indicated pictures on the wall behind him of his babies and his friends in the pen, and told me their stories. By the time he’d finished his handiwork there was a small line of patients at his door, but to me it was worth their wait. Because look what he did:
