The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (8 page)

Q. If I
avoid execution and survive into my senescence, but then develop a fatal disease or disorder, will I—at that point—be removed from the NJSDE “active list” and allowed to die a natural death?

A. No. Your status as an NJSDE releasee is irrevocable and remains in effect until you are declared legally brain dead. Unless certification of brain death is received by the NJSDE Control Center, your social security number remains active in the NJSDE system, and if that number yields any of the triggering values, you are subject to Discretionary Execution over that ensuing 24-hour period, regardless of your age or infirmity.

Several years ago, an octogenarian NJSDE releasee who’d suffered a serious thromboembolic stroke was sent to the hospital
for an MRI scan in order to determine the degree of neurological damage. As he was rolled into the tunnel-like magnetic machine, an NJSDE commando hidden inside, splayed stealthily against the scanner’s cylindrical walls, garroted the releasee to death, as bewildered physicians squinted at their monitors in the control room.

In a recent incident, an elderly NJSDE releasee was about to undergo a lithotripsy—a procedure for fragmenting bladder stones, in which the patient is immersed shoulder-deep in a special tub and high-frequency ultrasound shock waves transmitted by a machine called a lithotripter are focused on the stones and shatter them. As he was lowered into the lithotripsy tub, several clandestinely submerged NJSDE frogmen fired a salvo from their spearguns, killing the shriveled releasee instantly.

NJSDE operatives dispatched to execute ailing releasees in New Jersey hospitals frequently disguise themselves as grossly negligent physicians, thereby enabling them to move freely about operating rooms and intensive-care units.

Be advised, though, that if you die as a result of premeditated medical malpractice at the hands of an NJSDE assassin disguised as a grossly negligent physician, your loved ones are
not
entitled to compensatory and punitive damages. But if they can show that, during a Discretionary Execution attempt by NJSDE assassins disguised as grossly negligent physicians, the primary cause of death was actually the inadvertent result of a bona fide grossly negligent physician’s own gross negligence, then they
are
entitled to compensatory and punitive damages.

The most celebrated lawsuit resulting from an NJSDE releasee’s death due to concomitant deliberate and inadvertent gross negligence involved the renowned signage copywriter Leonard Gutman.

Although most signage copywriters are unheralded, their work is among the most widely apprehended language-product in the world. The lay public is aware that copywriters are critical in the creation of brochures, direct mail, print ads, radio spots, television commercials, etc. And some advertising copywriters have even achieved celebrity status in this country, commanding salaries commensurate with Hollywood screenwriters and best-selling novelists. Most people, though, tend to disparage—or ignore altogether—the role of highly skilled copywriters in the creation of the text-driven signs that we see everywhere around us.

Len Gutman was not only considered technically virtuosic in his craft, he was deemed a visionary genius. In the course of his career, he garnered every significant award bestowed by his colleagues, and was ultimately designated a “Living National Treasure” by the American Signage and Display Association (ASDA). His work is so ubiquitous and prototypical that it smacks of the primordial, as if it’s somehow existed
always
, independent of human artifice.

Use Other Door
—one of the very first signs that Gutman wrote as a young man—became an immediate classic. Gutman went on to write a stunning series of signs that fundamentally redefined our sense of public language, including:
Out of Service, Visitors Must Sign In
, and
Push to Start
. Then—in what is considered Gutman’s
annus mirabilis
—an astonishing
burst of creative activity in which masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession:
Do Not Enclose or Obstruct Access to Meter, Turn Knob to Right Only, Right Lane Must Turn Right
, and the sublime
Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work
. (That same year, Gutman also co-wrote
We Deliver, Totally Nude
, and
Void Where Prohibited.)

There’s an austere beauty to much of his work, pared down to its irreducible essence. In a famous television interview with Gutman late in his life, a critic is standing with him in front of a restaurant’s lavatories, admiring what is indisputably Gutman’s most popular, and arguably his finest, sign:
Men
.

They then move over to the distaff door.

“You didn’t write
Women?”
asks the critic.

“No, I wish I had,” Gutman smiles wistfully.

In contrast, there’s an almost rococo exuberance to some of his work—
The Plinth Is Not Edible
, for example, a sign Gutman wrote for an exhibition of halvah statuary at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Gutman was writing what would be his final and unfinished sign,
Excuse Our Appearance, We’re
—, when he suffered a severe coronary and was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital.

Unbeknownst to the EMS paramedics and hospital staff who ministered to him that afternoon, unbeknownst to his wife and children, unbeknownst to his dearest friends and his peers in the signage and display industry, Len Gutman was an NJSDE releasee.

As a result of a youthful indiscretion, Gutman had lived
each day of his adult life with the specter of impending Discretionary Execution. Remarkably, though, graced by the vagaries of the NJSDE condemnation process, there was not to be a single attempt on his life until he was 78 years old.

That autumn evening at 9:00
P.M.
, at the Control Center in Trenton, Gutman’s social security number was factored into the NJSDE computer as it had been every day for the past 60 years, only this particular night—according to unsealed NJSDE records—it yielded the numerical sequence 94375—the four billionth to four billion and fourth decimal digits of pi—exposing Gutman to Discretionary Execution for the ensuing 24 hours. Ironically, on the afternoon of the following day—and as yet unrelated to any NJSDE activity—he suffered the aforementioned heart attack, and was wheeled into the emergency room in a state of cardiac arrest.

Gutman’s heart was in ventricular fibrillation. The cardiologist on call at the time, New Jersey native Dr. Richard Cuozzo, administered a precordial thump in an effort to mechanically stimulate Gutman’s heart and convert it to a normal rhythm. A precordial thump is a firm blow to the lower half of the sternum, delivered with a closed fist, from a distance of about 15 inches above the chest. Cuozzo gave Gutman two additional precordial thumps, all to no apparent effect. He then initiated external cardiac massage, in an effort to drive blood out into the pulmonary artery and aorta. With one hand placed over the other, Cuozzo positioned the heel of the bottom hand on the lower third of Gutman’s sternum and sharply depressed it, holding it down for a moment and then
releasing. He performed some 60 massages per minute for approximately two minutes—again, to no apparent effect.

It was at this point that two NJSDE operatives—disguised as grossly negligent physicians assisting Dr. Cuozzo—placed external defibrillator paddles on Gutman’s chest and administered two shocks in rapid succession. The maximum charge for defibrillating a human heart is 300 to 350 joules. The disguised NJSDE agents used approximately 5,000 joules of electricity, delivering to Gutman a charge sufficient to jump-start a Winnebago. Then, leaving nothing to chance, they administered an intravenous injection of lidocaine, an anesthetic used as a ventricular antiarrhythmic, giving Gutman 20 grams, a lethal quantity some ten times the recommended dose.

Gutman, of course, died.

Early that evening, a hospital spokesman announced that Len Gutman had arrived at the emergency room suffering a heart attack and had expired as a result of deliberate and premeditated measures taken by NJSDE agents disguised as grossly negligent physicians, acting without the foreknowledge or complicity of Dr. Cuozzo or anyone else on staff. The media had no reason to question the veracity of the hospital’s account, and the story, along with Leonard Gutman, was seemingly put to rest.

Gutman’s wife and son, though, were not quite so credulous. Retaining the services of prominent medical malpractice attorney Irvin Wachtell, they initiated a private investigation, resulting in a disinterment and a new autopsy, and two
months later they filed a $25 million wrongful death suit against the hospital and Dr. Richard Cuozzo, claiming that it was Cuozzo’s genuine gross negligence and not the feigned gross negligence of the NJSDE agents that resulted in Gutman’s death. Specifically, they charged that Cuozzo had used “egregiously excessive force,” causing “CPR-induced thoracic wall trauma and fatal injury to abdominal and thoracic organs.”

At the trial, a nuanced and often sympathetic portrait emerged of Dr. Richard Cuozzo.

“Richie’s a surf-and-turf kind of guy,” testified Cuozzo’s best friend, Victor Polumbo, a hospital maintenance man. “Not your typical cardiologist, y’know what I’m saying. He never talks down to you like the other doctors. He’s a good guy. A Rangers fan.”

A podiatrist, who’d been a fraternity brother of Cuozzo’s at medical school in Guadalajara, testified about his extraordinary ability to drink and parallel-park. “I been out with Richie where we’d be doin’ shots and beers all night, and I got a Lincoln Town Car, and Richie, he could put that car in a space where you get out and look and you go, there’s like no fuckin’ way he just did that.”

“He’s never too tired to spot for somebody,” testified a gym buddy.

“He’s fun, y’know what I mean?” said OR nurse Sheri Hildebrand. “The other doctors, they’re so serious all the time. Richie, he can always make you laugh. Even when he loses a patient, he can immediately say something funny, and, y’know, you just forget about it.”

Called to the stand by the Gutmans’ attorney, Cuozzo was asked to demonstrate—on a CPR dummy laid out on a table in front of the jury—the force of the precordial thumps he administered to Len Gutman that fateful afternoon. Cuozzo made a fist and thumped the dummy, breaking the table in two. The CPR dummy was then laid across several cinder blocks. Cuozzo delivered another precordial thump, this time splitting the cinder block under the dummy’s sternum. At the request of plaintiff’s counsel, Cuozzo then demonstrated how he’d administered external cardiac massage to the deceased. This time the CPR dummy was placed on a four-inch-thick marble tabletop with thick reinforced-steel legs. Cuozzo began his forceful depressions of the dummy’s chest. By the twentieth massage, the steel legs began to buckle, and marble dust was sprinkling from a spreading fissure in the tabletop. In less than a minute, the legs snapped completely.

Indeed, Gutman’s autopsy disclosed extensive hemorrhage investing the pectoralis regions, intercostal musculature, and parasternal muscles. The sternum had two fractures with extensive localized hemorrhage. The left first through seventh ribs were fractured with severe accompanying soft-tissue hemorrhage. The right first through ninth ribs were fractured with similar soft tissue and muscular hemorrhage.

The autopsy further disclosed liver lacerations, splenic and pancreatic injury, cardiac rupture, pneumothorax, aortic laceration, and systemic fat embolism—each of which could be distinctly certified as a cause of death and of all of which were directly attributable to Cuozzo’s ungainly attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

In the unequivocal opinion of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses, Len Gutman was already dead when the NJSDE agents gave him the 5,000 joules of electricity and 20 grams of lidocaine.

The jury deliberated for less than fifteen minutes and awarded the Gutman family $40 million in damages.

Although Dr. Richard Cuozzo experienced a dramatic surge in his malpractice premiums, he was given an honorary fourth-degree black belt by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School in recognition of his accomplishments in the emergency room and during the trial.

And in a final irony, as he accepted his honorary black belt—the first ever bestowed by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School on a nonpractitioner—Cuozzo stood under one of Leonard Gutman’s earliest signs, which, though immediately recognizable as fledgling Gutman, betokens the compression and allusiveness that would so distinguish his mature oeuvre:

Students Must Remove Shoes
Before Entering Dojo