Do Not Resuscitate

So I just got a phone call from a very old friend. He sounded a little drunk. “Joe,” he says, “Are you home? I need a favor, like right now.”

Where the fuck am I going to be? I think to myself, I’m trapped in the suburbs with no car and the girl I thought I’d be spending the summer with is marrying a guy she met a few weeks ago. I’m home you motherfucker, and you’re drunk, and there’s a girl with you, why do you sound worried? “Yeah, I’m home,” I say.

“Are you near a computer?”

I’m always near a computer – I’m friggin’ addicted to my computer, I have nothing else to do these days except read about other people’s lives cuz I am sorely lacking one and jerk off to porn. “Yeah,” I say.

“I need you to look up the word ‘resuscitate’ and tell me how it’s spelled.”

“You want me to look up the word resuscitate?”

“Yeah, I just got ‘Do not resuscitate’ tattooed on me and I think the motherfuckers spelled it wrong.”

“You got … who did this?”

“A friend.”

Right, drunken friends who can’t spell should never be asked to tattoo anything, let alone words that have spelling bee candidate written all over them. “Hold on, I’m looking it up right now…” I was pretty sure I knew how to spell it, but since this seemed rather important I wanted to make sure I got it right.

‘Yeah, tell me how it’s spelled , I’m gonna write it down and then go look in the mirror and see what they did…”

“Ok, here you go .. r – e – s – u – s – c – i – t – a – t – e . Got it?”

“Ok, r – e – s – s –“

“No, bro, r-e-s u-s-c i-t-a-t-e.”

This time he repeated it back correctly. ‘Ok, now hold on, I’m gonna go check.” His voice grew distant but I could still here him, and some woman’s voice, who all along had been saying, “I can’t believe you don’t believe me.” But now she was getting quiet and I could only hear his voice, “I don’t know how to spell looking upside down!” Apparently neither could the tattooist: “Oh my fucking god.” His voice grew louder and I heard him pick the phone back up, “Oh my fucking god.”

“They misspelled it?”

“Oh my god. Yeah. Thanks buddy, I gotta’ go.”

I’m not sure if he heard me tell him I’d give him a ring tomorrow, and I have a hunch his solution to the problem was going to be to drink more of whatever he’d already been drinking. Hopefully, he’ll wait til he’s sober to get the problem fixed. It may be of little consolation, but he’s not alone: http://www.cnn.com/US/9908/26/fringe/tattoo.update/