It started with the worms. But
not really. I’d been drinking relentlessly (religiously) leading up to my Big
Psychiatric Appointment and my reflection looked like a scream in a movie
theater. I’d switched from Steel Reserve to a cheap boxed wine called White Burble. I hadn’t eaten anything more
than a few pistachio nuts in five days. I surrendered to morbid fantasies of
lynching myself (even going so far as to hang a necktie noose from my closet
clothesrack), or suffocating myself with Glad Wrap or buying a cheap box of
helium from iParty and poisoning my lungs with funny Mickey Mouse gas.
I prayed for the cancer to return. No
surgery, no chemotherapy this time. I would nurse the little black cells like a
protective mother with a fragile child.
My first meeting with the psychiatrist and
I was already an emergency.
It was warm when I set out toward
Evergreen Mental Health Services. The sky was bright, cloudless and intense. A
sky so blue I wanted to shoot holes in it. Assault the environment. My head was
filled with a loud, thirsty crowd, screaming, screaming like angry villagers in
a Frankenstein movie...
I began my weary, Don Birnam[1] trudge feeling every agonized
stride like a new wound. Every footstep carried the threat of imminent death.
My liver hurt. Two miles stretched ahead of me like Death Valley. After five
minutes of walking I knew I was doomed. I considered turning back and
cancelling the appointment but then what? Drink more wine and get sicker? I’d
reached the end of another rope. I needed help, stat. My desperation both clung to me and tumbled from me like a
parasitic twin with a disease.
Outside the puzzling young woman’s
apartment, by the steps there, I noticed a dried-out half-a-mouse (the
hindquarters) a spent condom and a bent spoon. More pieces to the puzzle.
A sudden sandstorm whirled, blinding and
granular, into my mind and I had to stop and close my eyes a few seconds for
fear of fainting. My mouth had gone dry. My tongue tasted (probably) like the
dead half-mouse at my feet.
I
can’t do this.
(All you have to do is get there).
I kept walking, forcing my weakened, burdensome
organs forward. Sweat started. I wished for a handkerchief so I could mop my
brow like Louis Armstrong after a taxing solo. Instead, I brushed the sweat from
my forehead into my (already oily) hair, pasting it back. I wished for a pair
of sunglasses. The sun was so assaultive I could feel cataracts developing over
my eyes like lenses of milk. All of my internal personae are weak and
desperate. There’s nothing to hang onto. Clark Kent turns into another Clark
Kent. Nothing under the business suit but flabby flesh weakened by kidneystones
of Kryptonite.
And then I had a seizure and fell into the
street, right in the path of a huge, lumbering truck...
Just kidding.
