Valium Please!

Glossolalian doxology:

Dropped, the organ-grinder’s monkey did drop, stricken by simian-tuberculosis, dropped with a last stertorous, “Ook.” Hidden in a pink pillowbox the sea otter cracks open a Silly Putty egg while the pinched sunrise brings gnawing sorrow to corrupt fear-laden attorneys. One among them. The Chameleon Virus struck Richard mauve. DNA swab deemed inconclusive by reason of molecular defect. Mint-flavored mitochondria. Put on this hospital johnny; I AM Hospital Johnny! Following triage I’m left in a crowded hall (no rooms available yet – it might be days they tell me with no TV) and given a Valium drip. Rehydration Excitation by the Beach Boys. Was that the one penned by Charles Manson? Like a chain-smoker with a lost larynx burping words, it helps to elude the claustrophobic madness that sterile, hospital boredom brings. Heliophobic Margaret on the beach, masked in sunscreen, marked with Noxzema, flaunting a floppy hat sewn from tatters of the AIDS quilt. Life’s not a funny thing. Twitching brings more brings more Valium-yum-yum. Dancing with a widow at her husband’s funeral: “So long, Bob. Helloooo, Babs!” Writing a requiem that reads like an eighth-grade vocabulary test (treatise, dour, penultimate), chanted by a chorus of illiterate street prostitutes infected with the galloping gleet (this being the 50’s and all). “Gonna need some penicillin here! Stat!” Sorrell Booke playing John Wayne Gacy in a Broadway musical called Love Don’t Shame (1985) to hostile audiences and even angrier reviews. Glenn Strange serving the cirrhotic livers of jaundiced cattle drivers at the Long Branch Saloon. Jerry So-and-so, the convicted robber sentenced to a life of pointless puppetry. Celebrated for glandular excellence. It was all over the news. Didn’t you hear? A Certificate of Achievement was given. Handed out to prostrate multitudes. How you doing, Henry? Big Nurse asks. Okay, I say, hunched over a speeding motorcycle, ready to die in the forecasted crash. We’re going to need a urine sample. Think you can pee through a Lifesaver? Butter Rum? A white table of grocerystore samples with aromas like distressed sighs. More grotesque than a medieval spittlehouse. A voice like Gavin McCloud’s friendly voice slinking across the liquid zoo through air vents of impossible exhaust. Hey there, I’m Dr. Blanket. Dr. Blanton. Dr. Something. I’ll take a look at you in just a minute, okay Chief? Appreciate your patience. Appreciate your patients. In the end it’s as natural as the Lemon Pledge you breathe. Channeling the angry spirit of Ty Cobb as it crunches through a bowl of Grape Nuts in Morse code. Applause at a murder scene. You have to admire his enthusiasm! She tells me all I need to know about my missing father with her catalytic resemblance to Farley Granger. As much fun as an Old Prussian Water Park. No splashing! Remain still! We still need that urine sample. Delirious. The dreary carsick toothache remembrances of the Class of `85. They served cold treacle and rancid beeftallow at the ten-year reunion. Butchered bits of tumorous offal swept from a sawdust floor. Date-rape tunes by Toto and Foghat; the cloying soundtrack to a hurried violation. The sound of sweat. Zippers and flasks. Oh, Hi Heather! You look great! Thanks, I just had an abortion! My third! Well, good for you. Do you have any pictures? You wanna buy some? Gray ceiling full of dead galaxies. Postcards from the Auschwitz giftshop. I stopped caring once Patty Duke died. She wore an expression like her transvaginal mesh had disintegrated. The restaurant served a dish so difficult and unfamiliar you had to get a new tastebud grafted onto your tongue weeks in advance just to experience it. Novelty ice cubes with frozen zygotes inside. Shaped like Peter Ustinov. Drop them in a drink and watch the little gibbons giggle. The chalk outline of a nervous breakdown. A used condom in the beak of a seagull. I’ve never used this escape before. Fake it till you make it. How does it start? Not with the teabags anymore, schmuck. Don’t tell me! The gurney floats the length of the hall. Sick, wounded expressions of degenerative disease pass like decorations, like Japanese lanterns strung across a garden party of awkwardly posed rigormortis cadavers. “Hey, make `em 69! Haw-haw!” It’s the 1920’s all over again. Like nothing happened. Casey Kasem: This next dedication goes out to all you used tampons out there! He calls running across a graveyard “corpse-surfing.” Everything smells like Ben-Gay here. I’m ready to give that urine sample now. No justice for the families of the neighbors of the families of the victims. How do you think they feel? A greasy-mustachioed mechanic with a prostate full of worms has an opinion on the Middle East. Get rid of it. Relocate everyone to Tampa. Sleet on Doppler radar looks like dead Rotarians. You could see it on TV if you had one. A foraging Sasquatch finds a McDonald’s bag on the side of the highway. Pictures exist of the hairy behemoth eating the remains of a twenty-piece chicken McNugget meal (you want fries with your colonoscopy?). It chews the sauce out of the packets. An Eskimo feeds a fire with books written by Adolph Hitler’s kid sister. She wrote children’s books under the name Namby Pamby. It must be done. Lemme check your vitals. Nancy Walker, murderous and menopausal travels to Baltimore and kills her ex-lover with a lawnmower blade. The tabloids fail to mention the utter insouciance of the event. My life can be condensed into one sentence fragment: Another Stanford Prison Experiment gone wrong. Novelty toilet paper presaturated with LSD and planted in countryclub bathrooms along the East Coast. Sexual mayhem. Situational neurologists treating chronic pain with pornography. Can you lie back for me? Does this hurt? How about here? In high school the girls nicknamed me Getthefuckawayfromme. At the reunion I wore a scarlet nametag. When I was a kid my mom got me Kojak bedsheets. “Who loves ya baby...” bald Savalas mumbled from the pillow. I’d never even seen the show. There is something else, I tell the doctor (blanket). One of my testicles is hard and swollen. And I come without ejaculating. America’s Sweetheart is a dead manatee on a dead-end street in a dead town. I feel the warm thigh of the nurse against my arm. Sweet memory of the brief encounter will haunt me for years. Using Google to search for the cruder things in life. A porn site exploiting the visual shock of apes and amputees (Chimps and Gimps) locked in carnal congress. My left nut feels like a golfball, has for months. A blockage perhaps? I show him. He feels. Awake from a daze, Mrs. Belbaum finds the Butterball in her baby’s crib. “Oh no! Joey!” That turgid song by the Cowsills about decomposition on a sunny day. Remember when Bernhard Goetz was on The Love Boat? Julie the Cruise Director had blow on her nose. They found human gall-bladders in the seaweed and had to close the beach. Illegal dumping of surgical scrapbuckets. Measure the facial expression of a man dissecting a dog and the data will match this doctor to the millimeter. A CAT scan is indicated. That and an ultrasound. They must begin at once and I’m still drunkdrunkdrunk. Mutilated soldiers file through the turnstiles of a petting zoo. Touch the goat with your armstump. How does that feel, Private? Fine Sarge. Just fine. What did you expect? Nothing to be afraid of. I heard The Scorpions playing just before the gunshot. Treatment and outcomes spill onto the floor like some kind of greasy discharge. Sucking the pus from used bandages. The sugary perfume of medical waste. The blind shriek of thrombocytopenia. What? Catheter penance for my sins. Metastatic action boy. Fuck. More Valium please, Doc.

·         Valium, please.