Day 18: Perspicuity (c)

 

Status: You find yourself trussed and strapped on a gurney in the back of an ambulance

Physiology: after nearly 40 beers. Somehow this is the life you have chosen for yourself.

The EMT’ers are doing standard protocol by asking rote questions. They ask you what your middle name is. They ask if you can recite the digits to your phone number and address. When they ask if you can tell them who the current president of the United States is you snap back and say you can do one better, you can name every president of the United States in order backwards. By the time you get to Harry S. Truman at number thirty-three they are looking at you like you have lost it.

“Hold on there buddy this isn’t Jeopardy, now.” One of the EMT’ers with short hair who you can tell frequents a tanning bed says. You are fine. You don’t need to be going anywhere. This is your daily routine. Drinking in front of your monitor, trying not to look at her visage, flagellating alphabetical emblems onto the blank slate in front of you and then passing out after a twelve pack and heading to work five hours later.

One of the EMT’ers is talking into his collar about a male, early 30’s, possible toxic levels of alcohol mixed with some yet to be determined substance. Your ears can register the anal shrill of the siren. Somehow the vehicle feels like it is paddling in slow motion as it speeds down Main street.  It seems hard to believe that people are pulling over on the side of the street to make room for the perseverance of your anatomy.

“That and the male kept saying that everything was ‘pessimistic.’” The tanned short haired fuck says into his collar. You feel like correcting him. You feel like telling him that the word is perspicuous, only you refrain.

When you look straight up you see your entire body strapped down in the reflection of the ceiling of the ambulance completley helpless. Like Christ tied to a crucifix only without the horizontal plank.

“Just stay tight Pessimistic, we’re almost there.” Tanning bed says.

You close your eyes and try to disappear.

                                                                ***

There is something about the word Fuck. Something about the way your bottom lip envelopes inside the back of your mouth so that it dissipates completely under the bridge of your front teeth as the first syllable foams plosive sockets of air before sputtering the vulgarity out in an eruptive bark. Something about the way it feels like a caged ornithological creature hatching out from the front of your face in a single-syllabic peck. Something about the way your facial muscles tighten and then release and then give birth  to the ‘pock’ sound. Something about the way it frees your entire physiology.

It is like you are trying to gnaw on the oxygen bartered to produce such an insult against solitude.

You sit inside the Gazebo on Western avenue across from where you have just seen your godmother at McDonald’s and shove tasteless mass marketed vittles into the orifice above your chin in a futile effort to sop up all the booze. Since you were in fifth grade you always remove your hamburger bun and slap fries down in the middle of the sandwich and then place the bun back on and  inhale in chomps. You have drained between 25-30 beers. You are exhausted. Your plan is to amble back to Heading avenue to your second bedroom and sleep for six hours and then go to work. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. You have been drinking since 8 am.

Inked inside the gazebo the word Fuck is scrawled in five different places, adorned like paleolithic cave paintings of cattle at  Lascaux. You take out your writing pen and begin to scrape into the marrow of chipped paint. Writing the word fuck is like playing a game of hangman, lynching the sixth letter of the alphabet in three off kiltered slashes before etching two disperse cul-de-sac shaped you’s punctuating the expletive with a thick kay.

As you are cracking the fifth vowel you think about the red headed girl in the tunnel at Bradley park two springs ago.  You think about when you showed her the tunnel and how you told her that in Shamanism there is a ritual where in a deeply meditative state, the shaman pictures himself entering the earth, following a tenebrous plume of darkness, of nothingness, incubating for hours before sprouting up being reborn.

You tell her that Jesus was like this. Being planted into the earth. Dying to who he was, to transubstantiate into the deity he was ordained to be-- death to the infantile ego, birth to the mature.

You tell her that the metaphor is that part of you needs to die in order to be reborn. To be that person you are ineluctably destined to become.

She looked at you and then turned the other direction as you find a tree to relieve yourself.

Back in the Gazebo you realize that you meant to write the word FUCK but instead you have involuntarily grafiti’d her name five times.

You are finished eating. You scrunch up the McDonalds bag into the size of a human liver punting it with your right foot, littering it in the yard behind the gazebo.

Maybe you should have one more beer before you pass out and die.

 

                                                          ***

The nurse in the emergency room has panty lines visible under the blithe sway of her  Kleenex- colored scrubs and she is chewing gum and has her hair bowed up like a pineapple cosigning hospitality. The last time you were in the emergency room was when you had a nervous breakdown after the red headed girl sent you a letter informing you that she will never be with you. You think about how her filmmaker beau can’t drink worth shit and how his liver is so anemic it could be used as a book mark to one of your novels someday.

The doctor comes in and tell you that your blood alcohol level is 2.9 and that it was probably higher since it has been two hours since your last drink.

“You’re lucky, some people pass out and die when they drink that much.”

She tells you that quite a few do actually.

She tells you there was no sign of anything other than alcohol and cholesterol in your system.

You choose not to use the word perspicuous. There is an IV that looks like a dated Star Wars droid plugged into your right arm.

The doctor tells you that you seem like a bright young man and that you need to take it easy. You think about bending the pixie-headed nurse with the visible panty lines over the helm of the med cart and fucing her brains out, fucking her so deep that you can somehow penetrate the hymen of her airhead heart until it plops  open into skittles of light.

You want to leave.

You endeavor to stand up.

“I need to go home. I work in a couple of hours.”

Both the doctor and the nurse are telling you that you need to remain sedated for at least another forty minutes until the IV drips out. The doctor tells you that you should probably just call in sick to work even though you have never called in sick to work in your life.

“You can’t just go home. You need to call someone to pick you up.” The nurse says, sounding like she just beat you in the gradeschool spelling bee.

 You have no clue who you can call.

“Okay,” You say, and ask for a phone.

You have no one to call. You are all alone.

                                                         ***