Cancer Fragments

 I hope you never have to go through this shit. It's boring as hell.

 Prelude

I didn’t write very much during my recent medical odyssey (which I’m still sort of navigating anyway). I wish I had (my memory is like a battered old movie – full of splices and jump-cuts and missing frames and  the soundtrack fades in and out). I wrote a couple of vignettes, and scribbled some notes. If you’ve been following me closely, you may have read some of this already. This will all end up in my autobiographical novel (Anosognosia), eventually.

Vacation

I’m sitting in a recliner, drinking alkylating agents through my arm and my nurse says, “So, I won’t be here next week.”

     “No? How come?”

     “I’m on vacation.”

     “Really? That’s great.”

     “Yeah, I haven’t had a vacation in a long time. I’m looking forward to it.”

     “I consider this my vacation,” I tell her.

     She laughs but I’m not kidding.

     “You need a new travel agent,” she tells me.

     “Yeah, I guess.”

     “Okay, time for your Etoposide.”

Wait

The hospital waiting area. Opposite me stands a rack displaying an assortment of sad cancer hats. They are all fuzzy little bonnets. I don’t think I’d look good in one. And why do hospitals offer such wretched magazines? Wouldn’t it be cool to find a Fangoria or Playboy on the table? Instead, they give you Golf Balls Quarterly. Trout Fishing with Diabetes. Pinecone Crafts Illustrated. I flip through a Ladies Home Journal. There’s an article telling me how to get in touch with my “inner Beyonce’”. I don’t think I should try that. Not now. Not while I’m taking steroids.

     They offer plain donuts cut in half. All the beverages in the fridge are 8oz and lukewarm. The worst thing about chemotherapy is the food.   

The Money Shot

They offered to freeze my sperm. I guess chemotherapy is an almost inevitable micro-holocaust for the persistent little swimmers. I told them not to bother. I sort of regret that decision now. It might have been interesting to see what kind of porn the hospital stocked. Did they have softcore or hardcore or both? Did their collection cater to various sexual persuasions?  They probably had gay porn, I’d assume. But what if your thing was sploshing or plushies or crush? Did they have any of that really gross Swedish enema porn? What about S&M? B&D? What if your toolkit only responds to stimuli of the Asian persuasion? Or Pygmies or Eskimos. The elderly. Amputees. Elderly amputees. I knew a guy who could only get aroused with his wife if his dog was in the room. We have an unlimited supply of very specific fetishes in our vast nation.  It's what makes us great.

     Or maybe all they offered were soft, gauzy Guccione-type pictures. Stuff with class. In which case it wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.

     Oh well, this is all empty ejaculation speculation since I chose not to turn my tadpoles into protozoan popsicles.  

Rash

During the second week of chemotherapy I somehow contract poison ivy. My oncologist sends me to a dermatologist. Dr. Kean Puce. He takes a quick, cursory glance look at me and declares, “Yep, that definitely poison ivy!” It spreads quickly and itches like hell. In fact now I realize that Hell doesn’t burn. It itches.

     The rash covers my face, making me look a bit like Rondo Hatton with zits. My right hand starts to swell until it resembles a Mickey Mouse glove. Little sacks of pus develop that I puncture and drain, only to watch them bloat-up again with a constant trickle of warm clear sap. I endure both the chemotherapy and the hellish rash for two more weeks. That’s when they finally for fuck’s sake figure out I don’t have poison ivy. The dermatologist had been wrong. WRONG, PUCE! I'm allergic to chemotherapy. More specifically, this poison called Bleomycin that they’ve been pumping into my veins. So, they discontinue the bleomycin (after a trip to Boston where a specialist takes a gander and says, “Oh yeah, that’s a text book reaction to Bleomycin.” Text book, Puce! You really earned that medical degree there, Doctor. Twit. Anyway, the rash finally clears and I’m given an early release from Hell. At least this particular hell.

     That’s another thing about Hell I learned. There’s more than one.

Buy a book! All proceeds go to a (former) cancer patient. 

Ardent Hearts

I lifted this pic from a law firm...

“What did you say?” She turned from the window with the question in her eyes.

    “I said, how long before... Well, you know...”

       Her eyes were red and they narrowed at him. “How long before I die, Bob? If you can’t say it how are you going to deal with it?”

     He swallowed. “Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

     She took a quick drag on her Virginia Slim and began to pace. “I don’t know. A month. Maybe two. They’re still not sure.”

     “Well, could I maybe, have your blue angora sweater, then?”

      She flicked an ash to the floor and turned back to the window. It was raining. “No, Bob. I want to be buried in that sweater.”

     “Well that’s hardly fair!” said Bob.

     She turned toward him, her eyes suddenly blazing. “Fair? You want to talk about fair? Is it fair that I’m dying? That my vital fucking organs are filled with poison and disease? Is it fair that I’m going to leave behind you and the kids to mourn me? That I’ll never become the bank teller I was born to be? Is it fair that one out of five people will contract gingivitis in their lifetime? Fair, Bob? How dare you!” She began to cry again.

     “No. It’s not fair. I’m sorry Victoria. It’s just that I... Well, shit, I really love that sweater...”

     “I’m leaving you my double-knit skirt, Bob. Isn’t that enough?”

     “I’m grateful, but the sweater would go so nicely with the skirt.”

     Victoria turned and reached out to him. She gently stroked his hair. A tear traveled down her blushing cheek.

      “Take the sweater then,” she said softly.

      “Oh Victoria,” Bob began to sob uncontrollably. They embraced, thoughts of the sweater all but forgotten. Bob looked deeply into Victoria’s moist eyes. “What about your Tyrolean Shetland wool cardigan?”

     Victoria hit Bob in the face with a large wet salmon.

Consume products! 

The secret pornography of cherrystone clams 

Early Development

I'm still waiting for my slides.

     By the time we got to the Fotomat it was just starting to rain. It was Monday. The shopping center was nearly deserted and the little yellow kiosk looked like an island on a calm asphalt sea. We were filming our gladiator epic and needed a couple more cartridges of Super 8 film.

Interview With a Lunatic

Gladys and her parrots. Oh yeah.
Here I discuss reception theory, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction with Justin Bienvenue.

Telepathic Schizophrenic

Sometimes I really believed she was telepathic. We’d hang out together in the summer when we both happened to be outside. She lived nearby. I didn’t have her phone number and knew not to knock on her door (that’s another story), so we only got together by accident. Her name was Claire and she was schizophrenic. I think bipolar too. She seemed so fragile, so softened by her madness that I worried about her. Her dark eyes seemed to be receiving everything all at once. Her nervous system jumped and hissed like a downed power-line. When she was having a particularly bad day, mental-illness wise, she’d talk in a squeaky baby voice. She’d say things like, “I fink I need ta poop. Make poopies, poopies.” “I wike buttersquasht. Do oo have any buttersquasht, Mr. Man?” Sometimes her baby talk would disintegrate into gibberish, “Widdle baby gonna weem. Dricky dela poo-poo weeeeem...” Like that. It was a little unnerving when she did that. She’d growl sometimes too.

     She told me once (on one of her more lucid days) that she wanted to teach a college course in, “Life’s Little Miracles” because most people never noticed them and she thought that was sad. “I see them all the time,” she said. “Like today, this morning. You woke up too early and couldn’t get back to sleep, right? And so you turned on the TV and that movie you always wanted to watch was just coming on. That’s a little miracle right there! Right?”

     She had no possible way of knowing any of that but what she said was true. For years I’d been meaning to see, Last Year at Marienbad and it came on that morning as soon as I’d turned on the TV.

     I don’t know if that qualifies as a miracle.

     But anyway, that’s one of the reasons I suspect she was telepathic.

 I know you want to click this.

Picking up on a vibe? 

Here We Go With Another Ridiculous Interview...

Dirty beatniks

Click here to read my stupid interview!

A Girl Named Maple

When I was four years old I knew a girl named Maple who could pull off her left arm. It wasn’t a prosthetic or anything; she could actually yank her arm off. She had some kind of disease or something, I think. A disorder maybe. Sometimes she’d pull it off and let me play with it. She could make the fingers wiggle from across the room.

Once, a bully called Squash stole Maple’s arm and climbed a tree. He crouched up there like an ape, holding Maple’s arm over his head, laughing. The whole thing was so mean. Maple was crying, pleading with him to give it back. Squash’s mom finally came out and yelled at him to come down and return Maple’s arm.

He handed it to her and then took off. I watched her reconnect her arm. The part where it connected to her shoulder secreted this sticky white slime that smelled like maple syrup. I guess that’s what let her stick it back on. Maybe it healed it back to her shoulder or something. I don’t know.

     

 Anyway, that’s probably where she got her name.

     

 Or maybe this was all a dream.

More goddamn stories in these books here...

Stable (full version)

 

                                                If you can read this you are NOT Glen Fadlo of Waltham, CT.

Bleak Holiday Sits Here. Click!

This story resides in the Bleak Holiday collection.

  The man sat at the table, drenched in the dense California sunlight that burned through the glass patio doors - American sunlight - and he felt like an important part of an important moment. He was in this place now. He stirred his coffee and scanned his newspaper and felt satisfied. He felt proud of his house, his career. He loved his wife. He realized this with urgent clarity and a gratitude that usually eluded him. The sounds of Carol fixing breakfast in the kitchen comforted him, secured him to the world, and after a while the smell of bacon and toast traveled through the swinging door and he felt better still. It was a perfect moment, an exact moment, when the very molecules of existence seemed to coalesce and charge his darkening heart; a heart that had begun to harden and retreat from the anxious complications of impending middle age.  

     The newspaper was still filled with the recent tragedy. A great American had died in Dallas at the hands of a troubled young man, and then the young man was in turn gunned down by a man with a jeweled name who ran a nightclub. He wondered if he should feel so calm and contented so soon after a national calamity and with this thought, the perfect moment was gone. One brief blaze of doubt had kindled it to mist.

      The man felt diminished again.

A Chapter from Conservatory of Death

  

                              This book is sleazy and morbid and makes its own gravy.

Available Right Here

“Drizzle,” Posy said. “Drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle...”

     It was drizzling. Early afternoon. Posy Pendleton watched beads of precipitation sparkle across the singing neon above her head: LIVE NUDE GIRLS in dazzling phosphorescent color, bathed in popping aqueous jewels. Humming, trilling. She stared at the sign, hypnotized by its celestial beauty.

     “Drizzle drizzle drizzle...” The word had lost its meaning. It had puffed into an amorphous blob, a hazy shape of faded contours and air. “Drizzle.”

Interview

 From Hell's Heart, I Interview Thee!

Saying the same word over and over and over (and over) and over until it doesn't make sense anymore...

Razor Wire Kiss; The Rest of the First Chapter

    

     MotherFUCKERS! Who are they anyway? Buncha pigs and pussies. Fuck ‘em all!

     He staggered down the cement ramp to the parking lot.

     The sun was gone but the merciless heat still filled the night. Christ. He didn’t feel like going home yet, didn’t feel like facing Donna’s bruised, miserable face.

     He walked around to the back of the bar.

     The sweet smell of marijuana greeted him on the other side. Two young couples were hanging around the basement bulkhead, passing a joint. They turned away and got quiet when they noticed Roland coming around the corner.

Razor Wire Kiss; Excerpt

This is how my vampire novel (the only one I will ever write) starts. -- H.K.

CHAPTER ONE

It begins with a kiss…

     Donna sat on the kitchen floor, crying, her face hidden behind a veil of long brown hair.

     Roland stood by the refrigerator, watching her narrow shoulders tremble with the force of her sobs and her small white hands shaking between her folded legs.

     He went to the sink and rinsed the blood from his fists, drying his hands on his T-shirt. “I’m going out for awhile,” he told her. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of beer, twisted off the cap and flicked it at her, making her flinch. “Is that okay with you, honey?”

     She didn’t answer. Another drop of blood fell from her nose, further embroidering the dark red splash-pattern spreading across her naked thighs.

     He left the house, slamming the screen door.

     Shemp, Donna’s cross-eyed Doberman pinscher, started barking, tensing against the chain that tethered him to the side of the house - gnashing jaws sending droplets of froth into the heavy air.

     “Shut up!”

     One day he was going to put that dog to sleep. Nighty-night asshole.

Bleak Holiday, Plasma and a Winking Leopard

Finally - at long last - the unanticipated sequel to The Membranous Lounge that no one asked for! Behold, Bleak Holiday!

There are some people that hate this cover but me, I like it.

Bleak Holiday

Dig it today!

 PLASMA

Plasma in the driveway

Plasma on the grass

Plasma on the bus seat

But Plasma has no pass

Plasma in the shopping mall

Staining all the gowns

Plasma being ushered out

Of ugly, angry towns

Plasma is my beverage

Plasma is my hope

Plasma is my Parson

Plasma is my Pope

And when I’m dead and buried

With Plasma in my grave

I’ll seep into the soil

No longer Plasma’s slave 

Aw, I think the leopard likes you.

Dink

Obituaries from Yesteryear

      I wouldn't take that cotton candy, kid.

“Happy” Herman Halperin, local children’s TV host, dies at 52.

Herman Halperin, who followed a thirteen year career as a beloved children’s television host with controversy, drug abuse, bouts of mental illness, and two arrests, died at St. Simeon Memorial Hospital yesterday. He was 52.

Happy Herman’s Ha-Ha House debuted on WGZR, channel 8, in September 1955. Hosting the show from a memorable art-deco set designed with sharp-angled walls, crooked doors, and askew windows that looked out on leering cartoon faces, Happy Herman gave many Clearhaven children their first exposure to Popeye, Woody Woodpecker and The Little Rascals.

The Incredible Melting Man (in Wild Violet)

      The original incredible Melting Man

A short, very short story o' mine...

The Incredible Melting Man

A Girl Scout once came to my door taking orders for 

cookies but she was so vague and cryptic about everything 

that I couldn’t, with confidence, order any.

 

In Sequence

Kitty Litter In Sequence