Chapter 10 A Swinger s Party Innuendo and Lancelot Enters My Camelot
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A Bit Of Worry, A Lot Of Pain… free porn video
A Bit of Worry, a Lot of Pain, and a Pack of Cigarettes
Oh jesuschrist. Piss a shit-fit. Godchristandmotherfucker, I’m shaking, trembling, trying to hold my limbs tight to my body so I go unnoticed and I’m not mistaken to be in the throes of an epileptic seizure or a victim of a Tourette’s fit here by these life-saving servants of the medical environment. I was in the midst of a break in my scribbling, coming down here to the hospital for my daily injection of mystery serum, braving the mean streets of downtown in my borrowed ’79 Oldsmobile. And the neurotica swept through my skull just as sudden as hungry piranhas through bloody waters as I pulled into heavy traffic. With hands seizing onto the wheel in a death-grip and a Kamel clenched between my lips, I steered my black boat behind a blue van, so sure that this strategy would see me safely to the doors of medicine. I couldn’t take any chances. My foot tapped nervously at the brake pedal, there was no way I could allow the car to float anywhere near these ill-serving cretins in their tin death machines. Looking over at me from their cockpits of hell, they knew I was defenseless and they were homing in on me.
The car itself was its own creature, an animal with urgings beyond my feebled comprehension. I could feel it wanting to sequester the will that grumbled within its valves and chambers and pistons and rubber hoses and other mysteries that lay beneath that stretching slab of metal called a hood, it was considering seizing control and taking across those two yellow strips stripping along there at my left, taking its chance for freedom. It threatened to fight, tugging at my shaking hands just to let me know that my supposed reign over this mechanical beast could be usurped at any moment. Beads of sweat glistened at my eyebrows– or rather, where my eyebrows had once been– and I considered stopping in the parking lot of that gas station up ahead until my heart slowed its pulsating beat and my eyes could keep in focus the active life running amuck in front of me instead of being distracted by the red lines of light that quivered and faded along the peripheral oval of my vision. I kept becoming distracted by the slope of my nose and the wonderment of how I could look THROUGH my nose when I shifted my eyes viciously to the extreme side, despite the stabbing torment through my sockets when I did so.
I managed the turn and settled the car in park, but my intentions of collecting myself to a state of peace and stability seemed ludicrous and childish. My neurotica was a product of my own doing, and so could be controlled. All, of course, hypothetical. It was all in my head, only nervousness brought on by leaving my position of lax and comfortability, by wandering out past my front door. I had become a home-body, dull and humdrum, and the outside world is a scary place.
I was there though, at the gas station, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. What to do. I was in the parking lot already. I felt like a fool. I knew no one was paying any attention to me, no one cared. They didn’t know what I was doing, why I was sitting in my car all sweaty and shaking. But I knew. I knew what a numbskull imbecile I was being. And I knew that it was written all over my face. A fool who knows he is a fool cannot hide his act, it’s like a giant marquee was put on a moving truck and was following him all around town with its flashing lights and giant letters. I had to calm myself down, regain my cool and composure, even if it was just in my eyes. I scooped the change from my pockets, counting through the quarters and dimes, and went to do what I knew would settle things. Doing what I knew Hunter Thompson, or maybe even Henry Miller, would do.
I smiled at the clerk as I counted out my quarters and asked for a pack of cigarettes.
What am I talking about?
Oh, yeah, one night, a few months earlier, I spent three hours waiting to just be let past the glass doors of the waiting room into the real emergency room. The first hour I spent sitting in a plastic chair with a paper-thin seat cushion, listening to the non-stop monologue this grotesquely obese woman was carrying on with a wheelchair-stricken geriatric, all about how long she had been waiting there in the emergency room waiting room and how ridiculous it was. I desperately wanted to have a cigarette but I was afraid to give up my seat and step outside for a quick smoke, just in case my name was called to be seen.
The day before I had gone in for my CAT scan, something I had put off for nearly three months. I kept referring to it as a CAT test, being reminded of those quizzes in high school where it was imperative that only a number two pencil be used. That mental image kind of alleviated the grievous seriousness of the scene, kind of enlightened the situation. Perhaps too much, seeing how I put it off for so long. So, finally, I did go, deciding that I should at least get it out of the way, even thinking that maybe they’d be able to see why it felt as though my sides and back had been worked over by a camp of wandering midgets wielding two-by-fours.
Then my doctor, the guy who had done my surgery months before, called me in the late afternoon. Well, not him personally, but his office, and they were telling me to get myself down to the emergency room all quick and soon. That sent my heart beating in my throat. Why would they say that, if something bad wasn’t going down? The pain was unbearable in its own way, always constant, but it was something I could keep hidden most of the time. But now they were messing with my mind. Why would they do that?
That was when I called my mommy.
After my surgery, when I hadn’t let anyone even know about the deal until I was out and laying around the house a few days after, my mom had insisted that I keep her completely up-to-date on any ups-and-downs. And this probably fit into that updating bit well enough.
She said she’d be right over to pick me up and get me down to the hospital. She dropped me off at the emergency room doors and went searching for a parking space, taking nearly thirty minutes while I sat in the waiting room listening to the fat woman talk and talk. When my mom came in, I gave her the update on my waiting but all I could concentrate on was that fat woman going on and on about her waiting and the pain in her shoulder and her fat mother’s fat legs and I just wanted to reach over and slap her in her fat double chin.
My mom assured me that a quick step outside for a smoke would probably be okay and wouldn’t lengthen my wait any longer than it would already be. God, how I dragged on that cigarette.
I tried not to think. It’s a failing situation. One half of my mind wandered and drifted, trying to catch onto something inconsequential, but the other half of my brain would not let go of why I was at the hospital. I didn’t want to think of what was going on, I didn’t want my worry to show through my always-cool at-ease composure. I had been granted an audience, my mother, and I could not remember the last time I had let her see any show of anxiety or angst in me (aside from the night my daughter was born, but that had been an understandable situation and mostly excusable, I think), I had made it a habit to let my mom– or anyone else really– see me as detached and almost-collected. And now, now I was on the verge of emotionally breaking down under all this weight and part of me wanted to. I couldn’t give in. How was I supposed to handle this all if I gave in to tearful blubbering? The waiting room was already full of pain and sad faces and worrying, I was not going to be contributing to any of it. It was more my style and self to be all uptight and bottled up.
I spent the second hour and most of the third curling in a wood and fake leather chair, pressing the hard armrest into the small of my back, trying to balance out the pain that was pressing out from where I guessed one of my kidneys were. My mom would glance over
at me every few minutes, her forehead knotting up with lines of worry as she looked at my face all screwed up with my attempt at hiding the pain. I didn’t want her seeing this, seeing me like this. I don’t like anyone seeing me so weak.
I vainly thought that this emergency room visit would itself provide the cure and alleviate the pain. That is all I wanted really, let the witch doctors in to work their voodoo and make whatever the crippling hurt was go away. I did not belong in a hospital and I only wanted to be treated and let go as quickly as possible, preferably with a big bottle of painkillers. There had to be some mistake to begin with, me being there at all.
When, finally I was allowed past those sacred glass doors into the halls of medicine, it was only to be seen by some type of clerk who seemed more interested in and change of billing address than any ailment which might be seizing me. After she jotted down what information she had been sent in to collect, my mother and I were left alone again for nearly another hour, this time holing up in a private room where the passage of real time was marked not by the clock on the wall but the sobbing and wails from across the hall.
I wasn’t talking much, I was too preoccupied with distracting myself from the pain, trying to recede further into my thoughts, letting my imagination act as a sort of half-assed diversion. But every once in a while I would turn over and face my mother and she would ask me how I was feeling and I would lie and say it was all right and I could see in her eyes that she could see what pain I was suffering and that she was suffering as well. And I felt ashamed.
Shame for being so weak, for needing this help. Shame for being seen so helpless, by my mother, no less. I would rather be dead than let her see me suffering all this. Not really, but that thought bounced through my head as I laid there twisting about, trying to avoid the pain.
The doctor that came in was young and professional-looking in a way that would not surprise me if I had instead seen him in one of those bars I’m always at. Sort of an urban look, but with a gleam in his eyes that shone of higher education. He could’ve had a spot on ER or some other hospital drama that seemed to be so popular on television.
The boy-man standing in his shadow was a bit less enviable. With his too-prominent eyeglasses and his bad haircut, he was reminiscent of the nerdy kid in school who always sat towards the middle of the room, always raising his hand to every question yet always getting every question wrong. And here he looked no more competent. He bumbled behind his elder, not looking as though he knew what he was here for any more than I did.
A bolt of foolishness struck through me, smarting slightly through the pain in my back. Why was I bothering to regard these men with my patented envy? Why did I care? All I was here for was to get fixed up, and all these men were here for was to fix me up. To think how they were better than me was a waste of time, time that I might not really have, and a waste of energy that had already been burned out. But I’ve always been so prone to that envy, always seeing how I didn’t measure up. Even laying here in my chic hospital gown, I could not find enough in myself to be satisfied with, I could not find any self-confidence needed to be happy being me.
The doctor in charge looked at me and then down to his clipboard. He seemed much too dour to be here in my room and my spirits were dropping out the bottom even before he spoke.
‘We’re going to get you upstairs for some x-rays, then get you settled up in a room,’ he started off, his eyes tentatively meeting mine. The thin mustache hanging over his lip twitched ominously.
‘Your doctor talked to me after he got back the results of the CAT scan,’ he told me. ‘He couldn’t come down here himself, he’s sorry for that. This… it isn’t good.’ He paused, dramatically, to look down to his clipboard yet another time, a trick of the trade I’m sure all future doctors are taught well before they ever reach their residency. The nerd in the glasses looked around uncomfortably, almost as though he was readying himself to bolt. He wasn’t real used to this business of handing out bad news.
‘The surgery you had to extract the tumor, it wasn’t enough,’ the real doctor said. He seemed to be scolding me, as though it was all my fault I was full of sickness. ‘The CAT scan showed that there are cancerous cells that have spread to your lymph nodes there in your lower back and into your liver.’
Christ, this guy knew how to spread the sunshine. But I guess subtlety in these sanitized rooms. ‘Is that the pain I’ve been feeling in my back?’ I asked, wanting to take part in this conversation, wanting to show that I was not as moronic as I really am.
He nodded. ‘Yes. The lymph nodes there are swollen and distended. And it’s spread to your liver, which isn’t good at all.’
‘Can’t you just go in and cut it out?’ I knew it was a stupid question but I would rather go under the knife for that quick fix than suffer any more of this pain bullshit.
I was trying to keep my good face on, both for my mother’s sake and to show these doctors that this was no big deal, that I was strong enough to handle whatever it was they decided to throw at me. They weren’t going to get me to bend, I was not going to allow them that pleasure.
‘So, what can be done? I mean, what are my options?’
The stressed look on his face told me that I really had no options. I knew that, Of course I did. People like me, we don’t get options. Those are up there with the breaks and the chances, the things that are always just out of reach.
‘We’re going to get you up to a private room and once you’re settled in, probably in the morning, an oncologist will come in to talk to you,’ the doctor was telling me. ‘An oncologist is a cancer specialist, they’ll be able to tell you more.’
He was hurrying now, wanting to get a move on, get to patients he could actually work with. I was only a pitstop for this guy, a quick detour from his being a real doctor and helping real patients, and I could tell he wanted to get going. That was all right, I wanted him out of the room just as quickly. Doctors are so fucking smug.
I held my jaw in a grimace, wanting the two of them to leave, not wanting them to see the tears that were beginning to moisten my eyes, not wanting my mother to see either, I didn’t want tears to come at all. But I’ve got cancer now, now there was no pretending or denying or saying that I had it taken care of. I have cancer, spread throughout my guts and rotting me, and I couldn’t joke it away or just dismiss it as another passing problem that could be put on the back burner to be dealt with when I felt like it.
Fuck. Fuckchristandshit. I have cancer. Not even twenty-four years old and I was laying on a hospital bed, rotting from the inside out, dying. I hadn’t even started living yet, for Christ’s sake, and this is how I had to deal with life? This is fairness, how it all comes down? How was I supposed to deal with this? Christ, I couldn’t deal with the life I already had going for me, I couldn’t handle the little problems I made for myself, this was so far out of my control that I was choking on the taste of utter defeat.
I wasn’t listening to what the doctor was saying anymore, soundless reassurances crossing past his lips that never made it to my ears. It felt like a fifty pound weight had been settled across my chest and the sobs were tearing at my throat, waiting to be let out and I knew it was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down. The doctor put his hand on my shoulder in that universal sign of consul and sympathy and I almost broke. I can’t take that kind of shit.
‘You hang in there.’ His fingers held firm on my shoulder as he spoke.’You can beat this if you fight it.’
Those were his ending words before he left the room, taking his clipboard and his doctor-in-training i
n tow. I knew I would never see this man again, my dealings with mere urologists were done now and hopefully I wouldn’t have to see another one for decades. I couldn’t see why any of these people would want to be messing around with the pissy organs anyway, what a lousy job that had to be.
The door closed. I sat there frozen, all stone. Letting it sink in, letting it register. I pulled my feet up onto the bed, pulling my knees close against my chest and hugging them like a teenage schoolgirl.
‘Talk to me. Hey. Talk to me.’
What does a sob sound like? A pathetic, choked-upon sob? It’s pitiful, and knowing how pathetic I sounded only brought more sobs and more tears. I couldn’t block any of it out, I couldn’t stop it. Everything was boiling over, pushing out. Taking over.
‘Bullshit. Bullshitbullshitbullshit,’ I cried out. ‘Why is this fucking happening to me? How is this fair? What? What am I supposed to do?’ I was crying openly, just talking nonsense as it streamed through my head.
‘Hey. Shh,’ my mom was trying to soothe me, trying to comfort me and calm me down. I felt bad, felt bad for her, bad for putting her through this. ‘It’ll be all right.’
‘I can’t deal with this. It’s too much. Too fucking much. I can–‘ My words and my breath heaved in my chest, everything was made thick with sobs.
‘We’ll get through this. All right? We’ll get through this together.’
But would we? Would I? I wanted to say I had no doubt, but I didn’t feel that. A nurse came in and gave me a shot of something or other for the pain but the pain did not go away. It was in my head, tearing at me. I was dying. That’s what cancer is: death. In my back and in my liver I was rotting with death. Whatever they’d say, the doctors, it didn’t matter. It was already in me. I wanted to think positively, to have hope, to really believe that I could make it through this easily. But I was already blown out.
Twenty minutes I spent like that, just crying my eyes out, sobbing and cursing. I wanted to just deny it all, pretend I never heard anything and admonish this diagnosis from reality. I wanted to wake up and this would all be one terrible dream and I would be home in bed with my head rattling from another hangover.
But my mother was right there, her arms around my shoulders. She was there to tell me it was going to be all right, that this would be dealt with and beat. She had never before done this, comforted me like this and tried to sooth my pain away. Least not since I was a small, scared child. But that was what I was once again, a scared little boy. Her presence, her compassion now brought its own bout of tears from me.
And I thought about that and about her being there and the fact stifled my tears almost as much as my own determination. To know my mother would be here for me was a strange truth to face. There had been years where our relationship had been lacking, maybe even the word is estranged. But this… this incident had come and she had not hesitated to be at my side. I know she had been disappointed with what I did with my life, with how I lived, but I could not let myself disappoint her now. Not in this. If beating through this cancer was what I needed to do to show that I was not merely the sum of all my past failures I’ve shown her of my life, then I would simply do that.
Knowing my mother was holding some sort of faith in me scared me, it terrified me really. It had been so long since I really let her into my life that I didn’t know how to react to this, how to cope or respond to what I saw as an incredible and overly-compassionate gesture from her. It wasn’t until later, after I spent a couple hours touring the hospital all doped up on morphine and I was laying in my new bedroom, that I even thought to tell her thank you.
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