Medicine – NEARING THE END OF THE LINE

COME ON BABY, LIGHT MY FIRE

~ ~ 1959 ~ ~

“Hey Beryl! Gimme a Pine Tree Float!” This demand causes my little cousin on the next stool to giggle-snort unsanitarily. Which feeds my ego. I’m on a roll. I mean, face it: that was funny.

But then Beryl, the establishment’s senior-most matron, always humble and sweet and nurturing, actually does fill a counter glass with ice-water, placing it before me on a napkin. I spy the floating toothpick spinning like a compass needle on the water’s surface . “Oh,” I say. “I guess you heard that one already.”

She’s smiling her Glinda the Good Witch smile. “Yes, Tommy,” she replies, “back in… oh… 1935…”

Lanpher’s Drug Store, the local ‘watering-hole for us after-school junior high and high school kids. Belly-up to the bar after the long day’s ride in the classroom saddle, and wile away the hour or so till supper time, nursing a cherry Coke or a root beer Fuzzy. And there’s the juke box, when somebody’s lucky enough to have the required quarter. The soda jerks are a bevy of part-time housewives and moms who seem to take a matronly interest in our tiny soap opera lives, and (the biggest reason we guys hang out here) the part-timers, the pair of hot ‘teen angels’ from the high school. And because we are God’s gift to the otherwise bored world of our elders, we preadolescent good ol’ boys ‘entertain’ them with the little witticisms we pick up from our older brothers.

“So …” she continues, “will you be wanting some dessert, after all that?”

I look to my left and right, surveying my potential audience. The high-schoolers have pretty much been here and gone. OK, so there are a couple of ‘dumb girls’ down at the far end who look like they could stand to be impressed, so I call, “Yeah. Make it a Zombie.” Which elicits a delightful “YUCK!” and a “Gross!” from my intended targets. “Make that two,” says my little shadow.

Actually, I can barely stomach Zombies, which are a phosphate conglomeration of malted milk and every flavored syrup known to man: orange, strawberry, lemon, lime, vanilla, Coke, root beer, cherry, ginger ale, and sarsaparilla. But it is secretly believed, in an underground urban legend kind of way, that a drink tasting this ugly almost definitely has to get you at least a little drunk. My real drink of choice is the ever-popular Root Beer Fuzzy. Girls invariably drink cherry-Cokes.

“Sorry,” Beryl apologizes, “but only the Pine Tree Floats are on the house.

“No problem!” From my pants pocket I ferret out a thin dime and slap it on the counter. “Plenty more where that came from,” I lie. Then I leer down the counter at the girls, hoist my glass, and cry, “Bottoms up!” I perform the ritual chugging demonstration, managing seven or eight controlled swallows before my autonomic nervous system drop-kicks me right into Regurgitation Mode. Slamming the glass down on the counter, I convulse with a couple of involuntary lurches and a shudder that nearly dislodges me from the stool…

“Eeee-YEW!” and “Ohmygod… you are so… disgusting!”.

“Ya got post-nasal drip,” titters my cousin.

“Napkins are right here, Tommy,” Beryl says in her patient, motherly voice. “Would you like me to wipe your nose, or would you prefer to do that yourself?” I glower, and pluck out a hank of them. Then, to kill time, I start to spin on my rotatable counter stool…

Oops! My knees bump into some high school kid seated to my left. “Sorry,” I apologize quickly.

“Watch it, shrimp!” He snorts at my limp apology, and sneers down upon my half-full glass. “Whatsa matter? Lose your appetite?”

“No, I… Uhmmm… I’m…just waitin’ for my friend here to…”

“Sure you are, shrimp boy, sure you are.”

I resent the implication that I don’t have the ‘stuff’ to down this drink in a single gulp. So I bring the glass up to my mouth, press my lips onto the cold rim, tip back the glass, and take a good pretend swig. Sporting a fresh Zombie moustache, I drop the glass back onto the countertop and produce a satisfied Hollywood “Ahhhh!”

“You could really use some acting lessons, know why? Cause you stink at it.”

I glare down into my drink. Suddenly, though, I’m startled by a rock-hard click click click on the counter top. My new nemesis here is tapping a quarter on the Formica as if sending an urgent Morse code message. click click click! “Beryl!” he calls. “Whattaya say? Hit me with a Hot Shot!”

I’m thinking, wait a minute… ‘Hot Shot’…? What the heck’s a ‘Hot Shot?’

Appraising him with her saintly smile, she dries her hands. “Oh no,” she clucks, a mother hen who knows what best for her chick, “You do not want one of those.”

He holds the quarter up like a playing card. “But I do though.”

OK now, see, here’s the thing. I practically live at Lanpher’s. I know the menu backwards and forwards. So this conversation is making no sense at all because there is no ‘Hot Shot.’. So naturally, my ears have pricked right up. Not only has he asked for an unknown entity… but she seems to know what he is talking about. “No,” she says, shaking her head in a kindly, agreeable fashion. “You don’t.” What the…? What is going on here?

And here he does something really cool. He lays the quarter down on the counter and just stares at it for a moment. Then he places the tip of his index finger on it, dead center, and looks up at her. A dramatic silence hangs there between them for a count of about six, like he’s James Dean or something, before he inches it forward like a poker chip. “Like I said. One Hot Shot please.” Man, I‘m thinking, that’s how I should’ve paid for my Zombie. My index finger twitches as I imagine sliding that imaginary dime…

“Please don’t ask me to do that, Jimmy. I don’t think you …”

“C’mon, Beryl. I got things to do… places to go…”

“But after a Hot Shot, you might not be able to remember what those things are.” She smiles wisely with an uncomfortable worry. He looks at her. She looks back at him. It’s a standoff. Finally, though, she blinks. “I’m against this,” she says.

What the blue blazes is going on here…?

“Beryl, save it, OK?” He picks up his quarter and holds it out to her at arm’s length. “Customer wants to buy a drink.”

“Well… all right then. It’s your funeral.” Resigned, she takes his money and rings it up at the register. “I wish they’d never started this, though…”.

Guys like me are always on the lookout for tips on how to be cool. We model ourselves after the Cary Grants and Clark Gables on the silver screen. I’m an apprentice in training.

She steps over to the high shelves, looks up, selects an object, returns, and places a little glass vial topped with an old-fashioned glass stopper down on the counter. With an inch of perfectly clear liquid at the bottom. Might be water. Could be white vinegar. The stopper clinks when she uncorks it.

“It’s not too late, you know,” she advises. He just shrugs that off. So with a sigh and a shake of her head, she produces a long-handled ice-cream-soda spoon from under the counter. Man, am I glad I’d decided to come in here THIS afternoon! He nods: proceed. Carefully then, lest she spill any, she drips out some drops into the spoon. When she puts the vial back down, I’m flummoxed. I mean, come on…THIS is the dreaded ‘Hot Shot’? What is it…? What’s it taste like…? Why, there’s much less than a teaspoonful there! A half-empty teaspoonful? This guy’s not so tough.

“Last chance…” she offers.

He looks her right in the eye, draws in a long, deep breath and holds it for about ten seconds. “Down the hatch!” This guy’s really something. Then he says, “Now!”

I’ve never seen a kid his age get spoon-fed, like he was some bibbed-baby in a highchair. Hunched forward on his stool… eyes closed and mouth parted like some faithful penitent receiving the blessed communal wafer… (me, taking notes in my head and contemplating how long it’s gonna take me to dig upmy own quarter somewhere… and what the best day might be to do this, in terms of gathering up a suitable audience. I mean, boy will my twerpy little pals drop dead with envy, or what!)

The scoop of the spoon passes between his teeth. His lips close upon the handle. He swallows. The spoon withdraws, empty. I lean back away from him, the better to frame his reaction. Again, he and Beryl are locked in eye contact, when… Wham! A violent spasm snaps him like a wet towel. He goes rigid! Then his head starts cranking around, back and forth… left, right, left… slowly at first, then faster and faster, like geez, here comes Mr. Hyde!

A rising low-pitched-siren moans in his open-mouthed skull. It grows louder… approaches air-raid warning proportions, the perfect sound-effect for the movie scene where fighter pilots scramble to their jets out on the tarmac! Beryl shoves a clinking water-and-ice-cubes glass toward him. “Here,” she says. He rips it out of her mitt and cracks the rim of it off his front teeth, upending it, ice and all into his mouth. The siren halts as he gulps at it, but then he freezes! He seems to be staring off at some ‘vision’ over Beryl’s shoulder… “Gah!” Then he’s thrashing his head back and forth again, his jowls rattling with ice. And me with a ring-side seat! “More ice!” he commands, like an operating room surgeon demanding a scalpel. Beryl, the obedient nurse, wheels away at once to retrieve! This is incredible! But then his head jerks around and his wild eyes settle upon me. “The hell you lookin’ at!?”

“Errr…” I wasn’t exactly expecting to get involved.

“WHOA!” He spasmed, just about jumping me up off my stool. Then exhales wide-eyed as if he’s just experienced some philosophy-shattering epiphany, and suddenly his desperate eyes are flitting up and down the counter as if he searching out a pen or pencil to jot it down, whatever it is. He’s blowing rhythmically now. Then his wild eyes lock onto my Zombie, right there on the counter in front of me. “WHOA!” he cries once again with another jolt, as if his previous unbelievable epiphany has just been replaced by an unbelievably even more incredible one!

Suddenly he just grabs my glass out from under my nose, tosses his head back, and chugs what’s left! Time to move down a few stools, I think to myself.

Nurse Beryl appears with a refill of ice and water. But with a vehement shake of his head, he declines it. He seems to be meditating on the last remaining intake of my Zombie, which he is now swishing like mouthwash around the inside of his mouth. “No. This… works… better,” he growls. He wildly scans the counter once again. Then suddenly, he’s digging down deep into his pants’ pockets. Out comes a comb, a book of matches, a small jackknife, and a handful of change.

He rifles the coins and plucks out two dimes, one of which he plants on the counter before me; the other he pushes over in front of my cousin. Then, with a big shudder, swallowing his current mouthful, cocks his head to the left in a four-second pose of introspection… sufficient time to clench some decision, apparently… and swipes my cousin’s glass off the countertop as well. And knocks it back.

“Jeez! These taste like… crap! But they work!” Looking down into my cousin’s sheepish eyes, he adds, “Doin’ you a favor, kid.”

“I tried to tell you,” Beryl offers.

“I know, I know. But hey, listen, Beryl.” He yanks a pack of Kools out of his shirt pocket. “You are an official eye-witness on this. Right?” He’s kinda gasping between words. “You watched me do it. So you’ll hafta tell’em, OK?”

“Of course I will, Jimmy. You needn’t worry about that. I’m sure they’ll…”

“’Cause I got something riding on this, if you know what I mean.” He plugs a cigarette in between his lips. “But they’ll believe you, Beryl. You tell’em I did it…? Then OK… I did it.” He lights the Kool, takes a deep drag, and immediately forces down another gulp of Zombie.

“Oh, you did it all right.” Beryl pushes the nearest counter ashtray over in front of him. “Despite my misgivings.”

“Yich!” he says, and takes another hit off the smoke. “Man! That ol’ Hot Shot! It just… it keeps on a-burning, don’t it! Thank God for menthols! I mean… by God! Whew! OK,” he concludes, tapping a fleck of ash from the tip of his cancer stick and then downing most of the rest of my cousin’s grog. And shivers hard. “Gotta get me some fresh air…” He shudders, rises from his stool, and is heading for the door, puffing up a storm…

Leaving me with much to think about…

OK, I already have ten cents in hand. Somehow I’ll hafta scrape up another fifteen… but, that’s what returnable bottles lying in ditches are for, ain’t it. But, need to get it by Thursday, because Thursday’s Boy Scout night over at The Hall, just across the street.

THURSDAY NIGHT…

Vanilla Cokes seem to be the going drink. And I like vanilla Cokes. They go down smooth, a lot like root beer fuzzies. But there is to be no vanilla Coke in my immediate future. Oh no. Tonight…? Water on the rocks!

And now that pretty much everybody but me’s been served their frosty little Coca-Cola glasses with straws, and the hub-bub has suitably died down, I slowly draw my right hand up out of my pants pocket with… The Quarter. And CLICK it, loud, just once, off the counter top, like Meeting will come to order! Then I let my lazy eye travel down the bar to gauge the powerful effect my dramatic move has just had on the denizens… OK… nobody’d noticed it.

CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK… CLICK!

There! That got their attention! Everybody’s pretty much all looking over at me now, quieting down noticeably and no doubt wondering, What the heck’s HE up to?

“Beryl?” I call down the aisle behind the counter. Beryl straightens up from jotting down some inventory in a little notebook.

“Hi, Tommy. Decided what you’d like?” I set the quarter spinning like a little upright gyroscope. The two hours of rehearsals pay off; the coin spins on a single spot as if nailed there. And then… WHAM! My palm flattens it dead in its tracks! I place the tip of my index finger on it, dead center, look up at her, and let the dramatic silence hang there between us for a count of about six and then, James Dean-me, inch it forward like a poker chip. “One… Hot Shot, please.”

Everybody freezes! Beryl looks like somebody’s slapped her across the face. “Wha-at?”

“What’s a… a… a hotshot?” somebody a few stools down wants to know. But this isn’t about him, is it. No, it‘s all about me tonight. I don’t even vouchsafe a response.

“Whoa-ho-ho-ho-NO!” laughs Beryl, but it’s a laugh in name only, one with no merriment in it. “No way, Tommy, are you getting one of those!” I’ve anticipated this response, and am pleased to feel the tension growing among the boys lined up and leaning on their elbows at the bar. Me, the gunslinger who’s just brushed back his coat tail to reveal the big iron holstered on his hip. I deliver my line.

“Oh… but I am, Beryl. I am.” Cool. Confident. So…

“Tommy…” she begins, and then just decides to end it with a simple, flat, “NO!”

“Sorry, Beryl,” I say, patronizing her like, sure, I can understand your matronly instincts and so on, but they’re wasted on the hard likes of me. “I’ve got the money.” And with that I zip the quarter over the bar’s polished surface where it slows to a dead stop right in front of her. Heh heh… am I good, or what?

“That’s not going to happen,” she informs me.

“So… what’s a hotshot?” the voice still wants to know.

I go straight into ‘gunslinger mode.’ “I’ll tell you what a Hot Shot is, boys…” me, speaking to everyone in the joint with my eyes, unblinking, remaining locked on Beryl’s. “A Hot Shot is…” and here I allow the silence to tick some seconds off the clock, for suspense, “…twenty-five cents! For the guy that’s got it. Ain’t that right, Beryl.”

“Tommy, you don’t realize it, but a Hot Shot would just about kill you. You…”

“Isn’t that practically what you said to that other kid, Whatsizname? Jimmy? And didn’t I watch him walk out of here? Both alive and well?”

“He’s four years older than you! He’s in High school! And besides, he’s… OK, he doesn’t have a brain in his head!”

I twist my mouth into a wry grin, and point to the quarter lying there on the counter. “I’ve heard that the customer is always right…”

“Well, that may be true, normally, but you…”

“And this customer here is tired of slugging down the same ol’ Zombies alla time.” Heh heh. Just imagine the whispers now: What? He matches drinks with some high school guy? He slugs down Zombies… practically like water? Wow! Man!

“Let me tell you something, Tommy. It’s true, I don’t want to serve you a Hot Shot. But more than that, you don’t want one. You just don’t know it yet. But if I give you one, oh boy will you ever know it then!”

Hmmm. She’s hanging tough. But she’s a woman, and I sense her weakening. “You ever try one, Beryl?”

“No, I haven’t,” she says simply. “Of course not. And I’m not about to!”

“So… how do you know if I want one? Maybe if you had one, you’d like it.”

“Oh you’d just better believe I’m not having one! I know better.”

“There’s my quarter. Bring it on.” She looks at me with a quiet exasperation. But then her eyes soften. She tiredly shakes her head in resignation. “OK, Tommy… you know what? You’re about to learn a valuable little lesson this evening. A lesson I don’t want you to have to learn, but…” She turns and heads back down toward the end of the counter.

“Thank you, Beryl.” I toss a wink, like a bone, to the boys. She returns with the magic bullet: the vial. With a nod, I point once again to my quarter on the counter. Surprisingly, she pushes it back in front of me.

“Paying for this lesson would be adding insult to injury. This one’s on the house.”

“Really? Hey, thanks, Beryl! This way, I get to save my money for the second one.”

She actually glares at me. Finally, “Do you think you’re ready, Tommy?” Her kind, empathetic voice is gone. She’s gotten the ice-cream-soda spoon out.

Well thanks to me, my audience is going to be treated to something special this evening. None of them’s even heard of a Hot Shot before. They’ll be talking about me at school for weeks.

“Any time you say, Beryl.” I answer, all cucumber-cool sittin’ on that stool.

Again the stopper makes the crystal clink as she removes it. Positioning the spoon horizontally, she drips in a few drops. Hah! Look at how tiny that is! So. “Down the hatch!” I cry, eyeing my envious fans doing the only thing they can do… sitting there gawking on me in awe and wishing they had a quarter this evening. I vouchsafe them a wink as I close my eyes and open wide as the cold spoon grazes my lower lip going in.

And as it withdraws, my upper lip squeegees every last molecule from the spoon. The payload delivered…. I swallow. And pop my eyes open.

“What… that’s IT?” I say. “I can’t believe it!” The Big Dreaded Hot Shot, one big… nothing?

I start to glance over toward my Scout buddies, formulating a calculated smirk when…WHOA!

My face does a freeze-frame! And then, with a sudden will and mind of its own, my mouth just opens itself right up without any prodding from me, becoming a growing, gaping hole in the middle of my head! Like home movies when the film gets jammed up inside the projector, halting the reels dead in their tracks… the white-hot bulb melting a growing, black, bubbling, burn-hole in the celluloid which gets projected upon the movie screen like an unexpected, mushrooming wildfire…

…and suddenly, the burn-hole that has spread open across my face, is emitting a long, drawn-out, teakettle siren— WwwaaaaahhWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

And like the delayed shock-wave racing ahead after an atomic detonation? FLASH! The IMPACT bodyslams me! My brain goes up in flames like a gasoline-soaked rag! My tongue blackens, curls, and shrivels like newsprint in a woodstove…my throat is EEEing like a blistered steam whistle! A tsunami of hellfire flames comes rolling over and through me, instantaneously smashing down any and all neural breakwaters and dikes and dams and levees designed to fence in my other senses, leaving me hearing the flavor, smelling it, seeing it, shouting it! My entire soul, reduced in a flash to a single four-letter word (HELP!) that my lips and my tongue and my larynx cannot, for the life of me, articulate! And even though my eyes must be running down over my cheeks like molten egg-whites, I am somehow oddly aware now (in a blurred, tunnel-vision sort-of-way) of shelved shaving cream cans, tissue boxes, band-aids, shampoos, crutches and canes inexplicably flying past me, left and right, like I’m a runaway fire engine barreling down narrow streets… hell, I am a runaway fire engine… on fire! My siren caterwauling…! Me running amok up and down aisles past the paperback and magazine section, past the cold and flu supplies, past the vitamins… WAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! …and back past the soda fountain again!

“Tommy!” calls Beryl from some place embedded deep behind the steaming membranes of my personal nightmare. “Back here! Ice water!”

Legally blinded by excruciation, I falter, veer left, then right, and finally lean into a hairpin U-turn to barrel-roll back toward the voice! I stumble up against the counter. A frosty glass is pushed into my smoking hands. Throwing back my head, and positioning my bansheeing wide-open mouth like some starving hatchling in a burning nest, I jerk the glass to my face and douse, more than drink. Cold water up my nose, down my gullet, down the front of my shirt, and… Hallelujah, Jesus! Don’t I feel salvation! I am redeemed, Brother! Blessed be she, the Angel Beryl, among women! I had thirsted in the desert, and I was slaked! I…

Gah! The reprieve! It’s only momentary! With all of the water gulped down, the lining of my mouth re-ignites like crackling tinder, despite the two ice cubes still pouched like acorns in my chipmunk cheeks. I try to cry out, More! but only sputter out a guttural, “MO!” My body and my brain have already done the math and figured out that… there is no way between heaven and hell that I can ever get MO! soon enough, so my legs are already doing what they know they need to… run! WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! Because they ‘believe’ (the fools!) if they can only run fast enough, just maybe they can outrun the flame thrower! But.. heat runs at the speed of light, and…

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! Rat on fire in the maze! Look at him go! Past the prescription counter! Past the curling irons and Vicks vaporizers! (They’d warned me in Sunday school I’d end up burning in hell for all eternity! Oh, why hadn’t I listened?) Past the cigars and cigarettes! I’m afire in limbo here! Down past the front door, where…

Something snags my shirt collar and holds on firm, sending my feet flying right out from under me, jerking me around like a roped rodeo calf! I struggle like a drowning man to get free and flee, WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! but am yanked back again by the front of my shirt. I know only one thing at this moment: broiling at a standstill is far worse than barbequing on the run! So I thrash! I lash out! And as much as a soul can realize anything when it’s a fireball, my brain suddenly acknowledges that I am inexplicably blinking (What the…?) straight into Mom’s face! WAAHHWAAAAHH!!! Where’d she…? WAAAAWAAAAAH!!! Oh… yeah… pickin’ me up after Scouts…

“Just what, Thomas, do you think you’re DOING…?” She is horrified.

I sum it all up for her: WAAAHHWAAAAAAAAHH!!! No man stands still while going up in flames! I wrench myself free and go pinballing brainlessly down the aisles again like a ricocheting stray bullet. WAAAWWAAAHWAH!!!

Good Lord, I sound like Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy!

But… whatever goes up, must come down, and she recaptures me as I come careening back down the next aisle, this time in an iron grip. “Tommy!” she says, with a face that’s drained of color, a horrified face. “You stop this nonsense! Right now! You’re…” she’s beside herself, “embarrassing yourself! You’re… HEY! I said, STOP it! You’re behaving foolish! You’re behaving… idiotic! Stop this right NOW! Right… this… instant!! You’re embarrassing me! Us! Right NOW, Thomas!”

The poor woman… but poorer me! OK. I gotta try to explain it to her again! So…………. WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

This time her face snaps into Serious Emergency Mode. Suddenly she’s steeled, determined, ready to do… whatever she must! Like the fireman pulling a victim from a burning building, she is dragging me (me, her dark, flailing, smoking, family embarrassment and the imaginary engulfed building he’s trapped in!) right out the front door!

Outside, she hauls open the heavy passenger door of our big black ’48 Plymouth waiting at the curb, more like a paddy wagon than ambulance tonight, and I am installed on the front seat. WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

The door slams hard after me!

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

“Didn’t I just tell you to stop that?”

I’m practically breaking off the side-door window crank (Must… get… cool… air… into skull!) muscling down the pane. Mom hustles around to the driver’s side.

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

And as she peels rubber out of that parking space like some hot-rodding badass High School Confidential teenager… WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!… me, I’ve got my gaping face hanging out the window like some tongue-lolling Irish Setter…

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Turns out, I was one hundred percent correct.

Everybody’s been talking about me here at school for days…

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NOTE: IF YOU LIKED THIS AND WOULD LIKE TO FIND OUT WHAT EXACTLY “‘THE HOT SHOT” WAS, LOOK FOR “COME ON BABY, LIGHT MY FIRE II” TO BE PUBLISHED SOON…

BRAINS

I’ve got this… thing about brains. No, not in the zombie way. But I’m just hung up on the very essence of the phenomenon we call the brain. For me, the human brain is an unimaginable, alluring mystery, totally worthy of pondering. So yeah, I think about the brain. Not all the time, but a lot. I read about the brain off and on.. And I often find myself writing about it. Hell, I’m setting out to write about it right here and now.

But being ‘only an English major’ I’m scientifically handicapped, aren’t I— way over my head in deep waters. No Bill Nye the Science Guy, me. I know that. But still, I just can’t seem to get myself past marveling at how you, I, and Bill Nye the Science Guy are totally reliant, for everything, on what appears to be nothing more than an approximately seven-by-three-by-four-inch “walnut”-shaped lump of Silly Putty nestled in our brain pans like some inert loaf of bread. And… that this lump is universally hailed by the entire civilized modern world to be the best damn Central Processing Unit and hard drive combo in the known universe, bar none. I mean, that just… boggles the brain. Yes, I’m incapable of anything more than writing odes to the human brain, inexpertly philosophizing about it, or asking the for-me-elusive-and-unanswerable cosmic questions about how this organ manages to do what it does. So this little essay is bound to end up just being another essay paying homage to the walnut-shaped lump.

Now wait! Don’t you go walking away telling me that, sure, the brain’s important and everything, but it sure as heck ain’t interesting! Are you kidding me? Interesting? Why, the brain is fascinating six ways from Sunday! And I’m betting I can prove that with just two freakin’ examples.

Example #1: Ever hear of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)? The man who did more for the science of brain surgery and neuro-studies than any man alive today?

Now hear me out. He wasn’t any white-coated scientist or doctor. So what was he? I’ll tell you what he was. Phineas was a common laborer who blasted out rail beds with explosives for a living. And I don’t know if he was a loser or not, but he certainly didn’t have enough brains to know you gotta be pretty darn careful when you’re tamping down blasting fuses into black-powder-packed holes with a thirteen pound crowbar! On September 13^th (13 being the unlucky number here), 1848, he was working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad up in Cavendish, Vermont. He was whanging that crowbar into the rocks when a spark launched it like a Chines fireworks rocket right up through the side of his face and out the top of his skull, landing with a clatter on a granite slope some eighty feet away. And after the echoes died away and the smoke cleared, there sat old Phineas, conscious and as aware as any of the crew.

And he could still talk. And the next thing you know, he was walking back to the wagon that would convey him back to his lodgings in town where he would confound a physician brought to examine him. Yes, Phineas Gage who by all accounts should have dropped dead on the spot but instead went stubbornly on about the business of living minute by minute; then hour by hour; eventually a whole day; and after that a day at a time… tor twelve years! Yes, a frontal lobe partially lost and a ghastly fame won, our hapless survivor of “The American Crowbar Case,” as it came to be called, entered into the Annals of Science and Medicine as Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient, the individual who single-handedly contributed more than any other earthly soul to research regarding how specific regions of the human brain control personality and behavior , giving the big green light to decades of experimental lobotomies, all the way up through One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…and beyond.

Example #2: Would you believe me if I told you that there was once a famous case of somebody’s brain being kidnapped? Perhaps you have. If you haven’t, you may think I’m joking, or misinformed. I have to admit it does sound like something right out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… if not Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But no, it’s true. And guess whose brain it was. Albert Einstein’s! It’s true. Einstein’s brain was stolen shortly after the autopsy was performed on his body right after his death in 1955? And you needn’t take my word for it. Just look up “Einstein’s Stolen Brain” on Google and you’ll get many links to articles and documentaries on the subject from a number of immaculately credible sources.

Or… why not simply sit back, relax, and enjoy this 3+ minute tutorial about it I’ve just borrowed from YouTube:

I can’t help but wish I were sufficiently brainy to be part of a scientific medical team that might get the opportunity to scrutinize the leftover fragments of what is allegedly the most ingenious brain in human history. I mean, just try to imagine for a minute all the recorded thoughts, ideas, memories, events, scientific formulae, facts, opinions, experiments, theories, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that once resided (in biological ones and zeroes) in the brain with the I.Q. that was off the charts.

By contrast, most of us humbly presume that our cranial databases consisting of phone numbers, lottery numbers, computer passwords, favorite memorized song lyrics, movie quotes, baseball stats, family birthdays, and future calendar events that we’ve got socked away “upstairs” don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the Famed Physicist’s. But hold on. Not so fast…

Sure, Einstein’s brain probably is by far the Rolls-Royce of Gray Matter, but on a sliding scale? I contend that mine and yours are nothing less than a pair of shiny, brand-new Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Because whatever the damn thing is that we’ve got sitting up there under the hood actually is… it’s constantly at work soaking up data like a cosmic sponge from every single thing our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and fingertips come into contact with. 24/7. From day one (the birthday) until this microsecond. If you ask me, that’s one damn fine, unbelievably busy, multitasking piece of hardware.

And it’s said that under hypnosis, a subject can recall lists of long-forgotten birthday presents she/he received at any age. I mean, how’s that for a universe-class computer?

Mine’s a 1946 model. And like the old Timex watch commercials of the 50s and 60s, it’s taken a licking and kept on ticking. I just did the math, and I find that I’ve been drawing breaths for approximately 42,000,000 minutes give or take, in my lifetime. And that’s only so far. So, I’m getting pretty decent mileage.

And here’s a thought: just imagine hooking up a printer to your brain and commanding it to print out your brain’s entire stored cache from birth. Whattaya think that would look like, hmmm? I’m betting you could tape all the pages together and string’em to the sun and back.

Anyway— in my very first blog post, “Unstuck In time With Billy Pilgrim,” (posted about 24,500 minutes ago) I shared about how so many of my very-long-ago-forgotten childhood memories keep surprising me, just popping up randomly, unbidden and unexpected, into my conscious thoughts. And that’s in stunning detail to boot. The memory I kicked this blog off with was a particular one of when I was four years old, at a family reunion in the early 50’s up in northern Maine. I wonder how many megabytes that little stored event takes up in my skull. I’ll never know. And if I had to guess, I’d speculate that the total data capacity of the human brain is measurable only on yottabytes. Two minutes ago I didn’t know what a yottabyte was. But then I googled “What unit comes after terabyte?” The answer on my screen read “After terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte.” It turns out that a yottabyte is equal to one septillion, or a 1 followed by 24 zeroes. And honestly, that explanation goes right over my head. I can’t fathom it. A shame we’re not allowed to use the full 100% of our brain’s capacity.

Regardless of that, when I die… there goes my four year old’s family reunion memory.

And there are maybe gigabytes of others. And since I’m wallowing in the plethora of memories that are doomed to die of with my passing, lemme share another sample just for fun, one more specific, little, neural-ones-and-zeroes anecdote that’ll be rolling right along in the hearse with me on the way to the drive-by crematorium someday soon. And perhaps this one will further cause you to reflect on the gems you’ve got stored in that yottabyte treasure chest of yours. Think about all the currently out-of-sight, out-of-mind memories, which are endless, that you’ll be taking with you when your time comes.

So go ahead. Meditate a little. And take yourself a little stroll down your memory lane on a sentimental (and in many cases not so sentimental) journey. And surprise! See what might pop up.

OK. Once upon a time, boys and girls… back in the twentieth century…

OK. See, I have this kid brother. Twelve years younger than me. He’s an engineer. And after high school he enrolled in a Boston engineering college. I know that I, along with the rest of our redneck immediate family, worried needlessly about him leaving our safe, one-horse town environment to venture into the great, who-knows-what of…The City. But he flourished there. And upon graduating with his degree, he was immediately snatched up by a large technological firm and settled down in large housing development in a nearby suburb.

One day shortly thereafter, he telephoned us to relate the shocking news that in his absence someone, or more likely someones, had broken into his new apartment and stolen practically everything but the kitchen sink. Including his trash! (He figured they’d pretended to be transfer station employees and had unnoticeably taken their spoils in trash bags along with them out to the getaway truck.) We were horrified. So immediately my wife and I traveled down to his emptied-out pad to give him some familial love and whatever support we could muster. Late that morning however, we found him in good spirits, taking everything in stride. A lot better than I would have. He assured us that his was, in fact, not a bad or dangerous neighborhood, not really. And we were like… Oh, really?

Anyway, that afternoon we spent some time enjoying the horse races at the old Rockingham Park, dined out that evening, and eventually went to bed. I say bed. Phyllis and I slept comfortably on the living room floor. (Ah, to be young again.) I’m not sure, but I’m thinking The Beagle Boys left my brother his bed. Too large and difficult, probably, to smuggle out in a standard-size trash bag.

But then, sometime in the middle of the night, Phyllis and I were rudely awakened not only by the number of voices muttering just outside the apartment’s front door, but by the disturbing, pulsating, red, blue, and amber lights bleeding through the slats of the picture window’s Venetian blinds. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came immediately to mind. “I’m going out there,” I told Phyllis as I yanked on my jeans. I mean, if there was a ufo landing out there, I’d be damned if I were going to miss out on it.

So I cautiously cracked the door open and slipped out into the coolness of the summer night. There was a large crowd standing stock still on the front lawn, facing away from me and at the three or four strobing police cars, the firetruck, and the ambulance. I sidled in amid the rear of that crowd. I remember looking behind me and spying Phyl’s worried pale face watching me from beneath the lifted blinds.

It took me a few moments to take in all that I was seeing, especially the dreamlike little drama going on at the front end of one particular patrol car. Two cops were down on their knees, flashlights in hand. Curiously, they were peering straight in under the front end of the vehicle. And repeating something over and over. “Come on. Come on out from under there. Now!”

I was thinking, Out from under there? Out from under where? Under what, the patrol car? What would somebody be doing under a frickin’ patrol car? This just didn’t sound good. At all. And talk about eerie. In the frozen, hushed silence, this had all the makings of a bad fever dream.

I began looking around, surveying the lay of the land. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice were the tire tracks in the lawn. A vehicle had obviously come rounding the corner of our building to my left and driven this way, toward the parking lot in front of me, straight across the immaculately mowed lawn. And judging from the six- or seven-inch-deep tire tracks in the grass, and the gouts of mud and grass clumps spun all over the place, this vehicle hadn’t just been going fast, it had been accelerating! My eyes followed the tracks to where they morphed into a pair of black rubber smears on the asphalt of the lot.

“I said… come out of there. NOW!”

Also, a long chain of heavy iron links lay like a rope on that asphalt. Attached to the chain, spaced at intervals, were the uprooted poles that once held the links up as a barrier to vehicles, a fence if you will. Said car had plowed right through said chain link fence, for crying out loud.

“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”

I returned my gaze to the tableau before us, as much as I could make out of it between the backs and heads of the witnesses in front. Of course, some of the backs and heads belonged to uniformed police officers. And there were several of them at this scene. I turned to my right and discovered I was standing next to a towering, black, muscled god of a man. I craned my neck up to speak to him and spoke very softly in the silence. “So, uhmmm… what… exactly… happened here?”

He looked down upon my pathetically inquisitive face. “They run him down,” he said. “They. Jus’. Run. Him. Down.”

Now, he didn’t voice that very loudly, but in the solemn quietness it was loud enough that three cops with stern glares immediately snapped their heads back around to see who had just spoken those very accusatory sounding words.

And me? Just like that old Kenny Rogers’ line? You’ve got to “know when to walk away… know when to run.” I executed a smart about-face and scampered back into the apartment with my tail between my legs!

Next morning when my brother, finally awake, stepped out of the bedroom, I hada coffee waiting for him. I’d just purchased the coffee at a convenience store a block away from the apartments, since the coffee maker had gone missing with the stereo, furniture, etc. But the real reason I had gone to the convenience store was to see if I could find out any information as to what had really gone down in the night before.

“So,” I said to my brother, “you like this neighborhood, do you?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Pretty much.”

“You feel safe here.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, I’ll tell you what. take the coffee outside. I gotta show you something.”

Out front in the sunlight now, you couldn’t possibly miss the egregious in-your-face evidence. The lawn was torn up a lot more than I’d been able to notice the night before. It was obvious now that the squad car had been gunning it fast and hard, practically all the way around one side of the whole building complex. Likewise, a much greater length of the uprooted chain fence lay snaked along the edge of the lawn.

According to the convenience store proprietor, the perp had tried unsuccessfully to break into one of the apartments during the day, while the three of us had been spending the afternoon at Rockingham Park. Somebody had caught him in the act, chased him away, and called the police. The cops had apparently decided to keep an eye on the complex and, in fact, had been surveilling the scene of the crime when the perp had actually returned. A chase had ensued, ending up with the perp being apprehended and scoring a free ambulance ride to a local hospital.

Before heading back for home, I asked my brother to send me any more information he could glean about the incident to me because… well, enquiring minds want to know, don’t they. So a week later, this news clipping arrived in the mail:

So. How important is this little incident in the larger scheme of things? Well, despite the fact that I thought it was pretty cool, it’s of no importance whatsoever. Unless you were the perp, of course, whose first name turned out to be Paul. Or some of the cops who ran over and arrested him to the tune of “Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?” Oh yeah, and unless you were me, who got a really cool, momentary adrenaline rush from it, something I live for in this otherwise boring world.

But… see, when I die, this little recorded event goes straight down the tubes with me, both of us taking that long Green Mile ride to our local, drive-by crematorium. (Well, except now that I’ve shared it with you.) so for the time being it’s also temporarily nesting like a little egg among your brain cells, too.)

Now, look around. Look at all the people. The people you know. The people you don’t know. The gazillions and gazillions of people you can’t see, those that have lived on this earth since time immemorial and have long since passed. All those brains. Carrying what? Knowledge, that’s what. Valuable experience. Unspoken death-bed confessions. The key to Rebecca. The answer to what’s buried on Oak Island, if anything.

So having pondered what may have gone down the drain with Albert Einstein, whattaya suppose Janis Joplin’s brain took with her? Or Mickey Mantle’s? How about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s? Muhammed Ali’s? Elvis Presley’s? Johnny Carson’s? Leonard Cohen’s? Genghis Kahn’s? Charles Bukowski’s? Your buddy, Joe Six-pack’s? And what other odd jumble of things have you amassed in your hippocampus?

I think of all the zillions of important and unimportant brain records that get flushed down the toilet of death, millions and millions of times every week. How about you? Have you ever had these thoughts about… the brain?

Did I mention that I’m kinda obsessed with the human brain…? I think I did.

HOME

ALTERED STATES II

In ALTERED STATES I, I described the effects that Percodan (Oxycodone) had on my… “sense of humor,” I guess you could call it. To keep from making a too long story even longer, I’d chosen to skip right over the early morning of that operation. So in this post, I’m backing up the clock to fill in that little gap.

Never having had any surgery other than the tonsillectomy at the time, I was of course nervous beyond nervousness. A day earlier I’d become violently ill while being wheeled down en route to radiology for a myelogram. (Myelogram? Think spinal tap) (no, not Spinal Tap the movie, just spinal tap the needle in the spine.) With no time for even a quick explanation to my gurney pilot, I swung myself down onto the floor and limpingly ran away down the hall. I ended up plunging head first into a ladies bathroom and, already making quite a mess of myself and everything around me, fell onto my knees before the porcelain throne and finished the job, all the while hearing the overhead speakers out in the hall issuing an all-points bulletin for the runaway patient on the first floor.

I turned myself in. And because it was obvious to anyone looking at my soiled johnny that I had blown my lunch, I had nothing to prove. So… I got wheeled back up to the 6^th floor, cleaned up, and put back to bed. My doctors were informed that I‘d been diagnosed with a case of the flu, so my procedures would have to be rescheduled for the following day, depending on the state of my health. I was ecstatic. Yes, it was only putting off the inevitable. And yes, I’m such a shallow person I was celebrating my reprieve like Catch-22’s Yossarian when a bombing mission had gotten scrubbed. Anyway, the delay gave me some time to talk to my roomie about what my operation would be like.

He however was hung up and dwelling on is how fast the knock-out anesthesia worked. “It was instantaneous almost! Like that!” he said with a finger-snap. “One minute you see the needle entering skin and then… whoa, lights out. And then suddenly you’re coming to in the recovery room, you know?” I enjoyed hearing about how quickly you’d go unconscious. Even though on the other hand that sounded just a little too much like dying by lethal injection at San Quentin, for my liking.

But on the other hand, it was… interesting, I had to admit that. And my brain had already started started chewing on this information, because I was desperate, wasn’t I. Needing something that would take my conscious mind off what was coming and keep it off, right up until the final moment. The proverbial bullet to clamp between my teeth, anything at all to take my mind off the buzz saw that was waiting for me over at the other end of the lumber mill.

Alright, here comes a silly thing. I had always wanted to be a writer. Not just a writer, but a successful one, a Steinbeck or a Hemingway, you know? And no, it wasn’t the lure of money. It was the great and overwhelming respect and esteem I’ve always felt for the Great Writers. They were my superheroes, just as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry had once been. It was a foolish thing but… see, I hadn’t figured that out yet, had I. And I wanted in, I wanted to belong to that fraternity/sorority. So consequently, I’d been scribbling my life away, jotting down great ideas on everything from diner napkins and to the back of my hand in a fix. And what had I accomplished thus far? Zilch. Absolutely nada. Well, nada and a gigantic pile of used notebook paper and diner napkins.

Why? Because I just couldn’t do it. No matter how I tried. I didn’t have the talent or the stamina it takes. And apparently with my little, small-time, one-horse-town life, I didn’t have anything to write about anyway. But back then, I was still looking. Looking, looking, always looking for inspiration and some usable material. Any material. And listening to my roommate, it occurred to me that I should take really good mental notes when I got the magic injection and went bye-bye. For The Great Book I was sure I was gonna write someday, who knows, I just might need to include a scene of someone getting anesthetized. My own experience would be an invaluable resource. So I began right away, imagining what it might be like, imagining what it might not be like, already preparing my mind to try to stay sharp right up to the end. If nothing more, at least it would be something to keep myself distracted, to keep my fear tamped down inside until this whole operation thing was over and done with.

Next morning, the big moment finally arrived with some guy in scrubs pushing a gurney into our room. I got manipulated onto it and then settled myself down for “the ride” (think The Green Mile, even though that book wouldn’t be getting published for a couple of decades hence). The P.A., or whatever he was, informed me he was going to give me a little muscle relaxant before we embarked. (Probably to keep me from leaping off the gurney if I got sick this time, such being my reputation after the day before.) I was expecting it to be in the form of a muscle relaxant pill but, no, he proceeded to lift the hem of my jonnie and with a syringe, inject me in the hip instead. No biggie. Didn’t hurt that much. Not as much as the Roman Centurion’s spear probably hurt Jesus when he slipped it into his side anyway.

Before leaving, I checked my watch. I wanted to have at least a pretty accurate idea for the record about how long I’d end up being under. “You need to take that watch off,” he told me. I wasn’t too happy about that but then, “Off we go,” he said, and it was off to the elevator with me and down about a mile of first floor hallway with Leonard Cohen’s sepulchral bass intoning “The Sisters of Mercy” in my head the whole way, as I watched the river of ceiling tiles passing overhead. OK, I’ve been told I’m a little overly dramatic at times and that may be true, but I was terrified, you know? And besides that, I honestly wasn’t all that entirely sure I was ever even going to wake up from the ordeal. I mean, I was totally a fresh-fish newbie at this business.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So. The guy parks me in the hall outside the O.R. and leaves…

OK, to my left is a large plate-glass window looking off into the very well-lit operating room. From my low-level position on the gurney, I can make out the gathering of powder-blue-gowned entities surrounding and hunched over what has to be the operating table. I can’t see the patient, but I’m well aware that I’m due to be next on that slab. It’s like waiting for the next available electric chair at San Quentin. I’m in no damn hurry though. Even though I’m praying for this whole hellish thing to get itself over with.

It seems like it’s taking just way too long.

I can tell you one thing. I’m not dressed for the air-conditioning here. This hospital johnny was never built for warmth. And all I have the thinnest blanket you can imagine covering me, and I’m starting to freeze.

Time marches on. Instinctively I glance at my watch, but of course it isn’t there, is it. I really don’t see why I had to leave my watch back in my room. It’s not a huge watch. I can’t imagine how it’d possibly get in the way of them operating on my spine, for crying out loud. I mean, damn, obviously it wouldn’t…

Jesus, how long is it gonna take for them to get done with the current body, and get my body on the slab in there anyway? I mean, come ON, people! It’s freezing out here. Hopefully they’ll at least have the heat turned up in there!

Time continues to march.

Suddenly… footsteps! From behind me in the hall! Somebody coming! Finally! I crane my neck to look, but it ain’t easy, stuck in the dying cockroach position. Ah, but here he is, yes, stethoscope dangling from his neck. He’s…

Wait! Don’t pass right by me! “Uhmmm, excuse me? Doctor?” Jesus, he doesn’t even have the common courtesy to slow down, let alone stop. “Hey. Doctor?” No good. So then, in my high school English teacher voice: “HEY!” And there. He stopped. And turning around, but looking confused, looking around like a guy who knows he just heard something, but…what? “Over here! OK?!” OK, seems like he heard that. God, what do I look like, a goddamn lump of laundry, or what? Or… jeez, I dunno, maybe he’s deaf? OK. He’s coming. Good. And here he is.

“Did you say something?”

Yeah. Deaf alright. “Yes,” I say loudly. “I did. Can you tell me what time it is?”

He leans down, getting a closer look at me. Kinda inspecting me. “What’s that?”

Yep. I was right. Deaf as a post. And me here not knowing sign language. So I try again, loudly and slowly, and enunciating very carefully, “What time is it?”

Now he bends down in even a little closer to my face, his stethoscope bopping into me, him looking a little pained and puzzled. “Sorry? What was that?” he says, shaking his head.

Jesus. “I said, WHAT. TIME. IS. IT?!” I mean, come on, gramps, you got a watch right there on your wrist.

He shrugs his shoulders. Shakes his head with a big, clueless, shit-eating smile. Damn, he’s giving up on me. So he turns, and with an I-give-up shake of the head, just ambles away, back on down the hall!

Where am I, the looney bin for crying out loud?!

More time passes. Guess I must’ve fallen asleep because without warning, I feel my gurney moving forward again. I can’t see the guy pushing me. But man, it’s about time! It’s a wonder I haven’t frozen to death by now. But anyway, we’re off and rolling.

The cart stops. Wow. This O.R. is very dark. Which is odd, considering the other one was all lit up so much more brightly. Well, it’s not pitch black at least, but still… and, surprise surprise, it’s no warmer in here than out in the damn hall, either. Which sucks. It seems my push-cart has disappeared.

Anyway, I tell myself, OK, let’s be ready. It can happen any time at all. Gotta pay very close attention when they put that needle in. And gotta remember all the details, what it’s like, drifting off so quickly into la la land.

But you’d think, though, wouldn’t you, that they’d have started by…

Whoa, somebody’s… crying? Oh yeah. Sobbing, really. What, in here? Right where I’m gonna get operated on?

My eyes are pretty much adjusting to the low light. I look around, take a better look-see. So there’s another gurney right next to mine. With somebody lying on it. And whoever he is, he’s just let out a long, whooping, baleful moan, like he’s trying to howl at the frickin’ moon! I mean c’mon, ladies and germs, let’s get this show on the road. I haven’t got all day! What did they, forget about me?

Actually, there’s more than two gurneys in here. There’s a lot of them. And… they’re not empty, either. Christ, it’s like a parking garage in here.

OK, now somebody somewhere off to my right’s muttering, jabbering like talking in her sleep.

Over and above the powerful clinical antiseptic odors, I smell vomit! Gross. And where the hell are my surgeons? And nurses? OK, I’m starting to panic. Somebody, cries, “Get me the hell outta here!” and it turns … that was me, and because I jumped up a little when I yelled it, a hot, searing pain I swear I can’t even believe goes ripping violently like a chainsaw up my spine. I collapse back, exhausted, promising myself I am never gonna even try to move ever again. Ever. It’s not worth it.

Oh sure, now other voices have joined in, moaning curses and pleas. It’s utter madness… Christ, I’m in a damn zombie movie!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Though I’m a slow study in the best of times, but little by little my re-awakening brain began connecting the dots, and piecing together the confusing but now obvious clues. That doctor in the hall? He wasn’t deaf. It was me. I was unintelligible. My flabby fat lips were connected to a brain-dead brain and were incapable of producing anything more than gobbledeegook. And when the intern, or whatever he was, the one who slipped the injection of “muscle relaxant” into my hip? No shit, Sherlock!. That was it! That was the very thing I’d been waiting for! But, damnit, I wasn’t ready for it! Was I. So yeah, I missed it! I must’ve been knocked the moment he withdrew the damn syringe from my hip. And all of that watching the ceiling tiles on the way down to the O.R.? That’s when I was leaving the O.R., not travelling to it.It was like that Dr. Hook song, “I Got Stoned and Missed it…

So there I was. Lying there, in the recovery room! Post-op. Moaning and mumbling like all of the other post-ops. So, it was all over. All over but the shouting. Me just lying there, waiting the long wait for my ride back up to the sixth floor, where I could commiserate and compare notes with my roomie.

And begin trying my luck at to scoring Percodan from the nurses up there. Chanting the chant: percodan percodan percodan!

home

ALTERED STATES Part I

At a local hospital back in ‘51, I had my first experience of being put under with ether. My tonsils were to be removed. And little Chicken Little 4-year old me, my sky was falling. I practically had to be hogtied and dragged kicking and screaming, into the operating room. It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t care how sore my sore throat had gotten, I wanted no part of it. There just had to be some other way, any other way. Mostly because this was back in the day when doctors routinely got away with grinning right into your little face and lying through their teeth with impunity. “Now, this isn’t going to hurt one bit, son.” That bullshit lie had been lied to me every time I’d been hogtied and dragged to a doctor’s office before so I was expecting The Big Hurt, but I never expected anything like I was about to experience:

In my memory, this is kinda how it went down:

LITTLE TOMMY’S VERY 1ST BLACKOUT

(let’s play a little “game,” tommy)

my brain still freezing up with

all the new vocabulary:

“tonsillectomy,”

“adenoids,”

“ether”…

(let’s see if you can

count backwards

from a hundred…)

NO. NO! I DON’T WANT TO!

me, 4½, laid out on the table , a little

dissection-tray frog-in-a-johnnie

johnny on the spot box-canyoned in

by a faceless wall of halloween

gowns & masks

onestranger-danger-demon

unstoppering an evil vial of

hospital-fumes concentrate,

terror in a bottle, splashing

a gauze rag with the liquid

(ok, tommy, we start with 100…

right…?

then 99…

so…?

what comes next…?)

the ice-wet invisible-flame rag is

what comes next, slapped over

my mouth & flaring nostrils

and pressed

down

(come on, now… what comes next, tommy?)

stifling my silenced

fire-throated

screechface…

searing my cheeks…

burn-buttoning-up my eyes

what comes next is that i

become a kicking fighting

rikki tikki tavi clawing the

poison gag off my head and

flinging it splat against the wall

bringing reinforcements

bearing down on me like

towering thunderheads,

one for each limb, one to

clamp my face in a vise

bad-dream people

cooing sweet lies

hell’s pigeons,

overpowering

muscling me

drowning me in betrayal

pinning me down

me struggling down…

succumbing

down…

sinking down

down to the

bottom of a

cellar-dark

sunless

sea…

And right before I completely winked-out in the jet-black ink cloak of death—I saw something!

Bubbles!

At least that’s all I could think to call them. Not like soap bubbles though. You’d never’ve been able to make out bubble-pipe soap bubbles against such a black background. No, these were bright-white rings (not disks), like perfectly round onion rings, only pure electric white. Rising slowly up and out of sight… which is how I knew I was sinking down. Big ones, some small, and some middle-sized. Slowly spooling upward like the music roll in a player piano. And then suddenly floating up into my view as I was sinking my way down, came a definite surprise:

The frogman!

My brain immediately recognized it for what it was because I had a little toy Navy skin diver I’d gotten as a prize out of a box of cereal at home. You’d pack a little plastic compartment in him with baking powder, sink him in your bath water, and he’d bubble for a bit before eventually rise back up, supposedly for air. But the scuba man that I was passing on my way down seemed to be a drawing of one, just like all the little white circles, in that he was basically a pure white outline of a frogman. As if he’d been drawn with a white marker on a page of black construction paper. The vertical cylinder drawn down his back was the “air tank,” and the horizontal oval across his face, the face mask. Just a typical, basic line-drawing picture you might find in a coloring book for toddlers. And he wasn’t animated in any way, didn’t move at all.

And that was that

I woke up minus the tonsils but with an razor-cut sore throat, dried blood on the front of my johnnie (yes, I remember being horrified at discovering that), and the frosty six-pack of cream soda, my reward.

The dream excited me long after. I remember trying to describe it to Mom, Dad, my siblings, and the neighborhood kids, but I really didn’t have much of a command for words back then. “Black,” “frogman,” and “bubbles” didn’t translate all that well. They just thought it was funn. But that experience was really a big deal to me. Kinda magical. I’d never had dreams anything like that one before. And I dwelled on it for weeks thereafter, often trying to sketch that little Navy frogman amid all his bubbles with pencil on paper.

This is what gets me: The brain is such a magical little device. So mysterious, like something you’d expect to find residing in Alice’s Wonderland, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar for instance. But no, this marvel remains alive and kicking right upstairs, embedded just above the shoulders inside that body of yours – your very own little state-of-the-art-PLUS nano-computer, plugging away 24/7 at taking care of your business. It’s just that 99% of the time you’re so busy using the darn thing, you forget it’s even there. Of no conscious concern to you. And why should it be? Who’s got the time to contemplate their navel, let alone their brain all the time, right? I mean, we’d get bogged down in no time if we were continuously pondering all of the lobes and circuits and various functions going on up there. I mean, you’ve got a life to live, haven’t you.. So any philosophical queries about your brain just naturally hafta get put on the back burner, almost totally out of sight, out of mind.

However there are certain times throughout life when your sub-consciousness may get jolted out of its complacency, a time when you end up feeling a rare need to put those workings of that brains-on-board of yours under the microscope. A hospital is a common place for it to happen.

For instance I’ve known of a number of people (but two personally) who sustained temporary brain injuries. In both cases, the injuries seemed to temporarily knock out whatever the little censor-subroutine programmed into our gray matter is… the one that unconsciously keeps us (well, most of anyway) from swearing like jolly Roger pirates all the time in public. (Some of us don’t need a brain injury for that.) One of the patients was a young, fairly saintly Methodist Sunday school teacher, and when her parents came rushing to her side at the hospital, they suffered near deaths from embarrassment when confronted by her barrage of more loud F-bombs than was ever spoken by the cast in the movie The Boondock Saints. How odd, our brain…

Hospital administered prescriptions and anesthesia cantake our brains down paths less traveled, as can high fevers, mental illnesses, abject fear, and even extreme tiredness . Personally, over my relatively long lifetime I’ve personally experienced a fair number of bizarre reactions to hospital-administered anesthesia and medications. They weren’t so much fun when I experienced them, but they’ve become something fun to look back on and talk about in retrospect.

In 1977 I was hospitalized to undergo a laminectomy. Somehow I’d crushed a disc in my lower spine and was in such agonizing pain I could no longer walk or work. surgeon described the procedure I was about to undergo thusly: “Imagine your disc as a little can of crabmeat. When it gets squished , it pops right open, squirting crabmeat every which way. Some of the crabmeat collectson some nearby nerves, hardening there and putting a great deal of unwanted pressure on them. This pressure is what’s causing your extreme pain. A laminectomy is where we go in and scrape away all of that painful crabmeat.

My hospital roommate turned out to be a young Vietnam vet, obviously in much worse pain than I. Our surgical procedures were to be somewhat similar, with his obviously being the more perilous and painful. His injuries were located up along the forward sections of his spine, meaning that the surgeons were going to have to cut their way in from the front, and then push his stomach temporarily out of the way so they could get at his spine. The description made me almost pass out.

After his surgery the next day, he came back reeking of warm antiseptics and moaning ghastly moans in a troubled sleep, especially when they rolled him like a corpse-in-a body-bag back off the gurney and sacked him back onto his bed. I watched as they re-connected him back up to the IV’s and monitors. Then they logged his vitals and swept out of the room. And I, with nothing better to do, settled in for the long watch, waiting for him to come to. A half hour later his longer drawn-out moans started getting mixed with mumbled curses, primarily sighed F-bombs. And at last his eyes, the wild eyes of some crazed, stampeded steer, opened and burned into mine. “Fuck!” It was spat at me like his condition was somehow all my fault.

I said, “Hi.”

Then he jumped the bejeezus out of me by suddenly yelling, “HEY!” at the door to the hallway which had been left open. That volley had stopped a passing nurse in her tracks. She turned, smiled prettily, and said, “Yes?”

“Percodan!” It was spoken like a command, the way someone might say, “Your money or your life!”

Her eyes twinkled as she continued the pretty smile for an overly long moment, sizing him up. “Well, we’ll just have to see what your doctor has to say about that, won’t we.” And away she went on down the hall.

He fired the single word “NO!” after her. I was shocked. But she was gone. So what? The hallway was filled with ambulatory nurses, wasn’t it. And as each one passed, he’d stop moaning long enough to call “Percodan!” at them. They paid him no mind. Apparently he wasn’t unique.

It was both humorous and pathetic. And as time went on, his plea became an auctioneer’s sing-song: “Percodan percodan percodan percodan…” with his hand, held palm up like some legless beggar’s squatting in an alley of a Moroccan bazaar, awaiting alms. “Come on, people! You’ve got it. I know it. You know it. We ALL know it! Eventually, of course, it paid off. When it was time for his meds anyway, of course. A nurse did materialize, dropped the prescribed Percodan into his sweaty little palm, and cooed sweetly, “There. I hope you’re happy now.” He was, thank God. I rolled over onto my back.

A bit later, I noticed it had gotten very quiet. Too quiet, as they say in Hollywood lines. I looked over. And there he was, lying on his side, looking straight back at me, a big grin plastered all over his face. “You’re feeling better,” I observed.

“Oh, you better believe it,” he said. And then he started doing something terrible. He began struggling at pushing himself upward with his elbows and arms! He was trying to… get up!

“Hey! Whatta ya think you’re doing!?”

“Gotta… take… a piss.”

“No no NO! Stop that. Right now! You’ll rip out your damn stitches for Chrissake!”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“NO!” I clawed the little hospital room buzzer out from under my pillow and laid on it, sounding the alarm, and started yelling, “Nurse! NURSES! HELP!”

He’d actually gotten his legs dangling over the side of the bed before a small phalanx of nurses and doctors rushed in and almost literally tackled him. They got him wrestled down onto his back. In the ensuing struggle, and as they went to work checking his incision, I unfortunately caught just a fleeting glimpse of his wound. And it was awful. A foot or so long, an “smile” cut across the abuse-swollen, pink-salmon abdomen like some Stephen King Halloween grin, all crazy-stitched back together with black surgical threads like the kind Polynesian natives used to sew up the eyes of their infamous shrunken heads back in the nineteenth century . I came close to gagging. Close to fainting. But…

I was also thunderstruck. I had just learned something. I was thinking, Wow. With a few-hours-old serious injury like that, and he was serenely smiling. He was gonna get up on his feet and head to the can. In all that pain. I mean, Jesus, that “percodan’s gotta be pretty powerful and mighty stuff!

Good to know…

The following afternoon it was my turn . I got wheeled back in and dumped like a side of refrigerated beef onto my slab of a bedbed. My roommate, my guru, was sitting up and waiting for me with an opioid grin. The pain got overwhelming. But in no time at all, my coach had me going through the routine by the numbers: Hey! Nurse! C’mon! Percodan percodan percodan… and right away I got to discover first-hand the perk behind what it was that put the perk in Percodan. It was magic. My body was dying in pain and yes, I knew this… but my brain didn’t. It was crazy. Oh sure, there was still a lot of pain, but it was nothing like the dreaded Percodan-less agony, was it. Not only that, I’d also discovered two side effects of The Big Perc that I was going to have to get accustomed to dealing with during my hospital stay.

The first being that Percodan left me drowsy and helplessly prone to drifting off to dreamland without warning several times a day. That wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the dreams. I’d be in a car or on a bike that would start rolling, faster and then terrifyingly out-of-control faster and then, all of a sudden WHAM! I’d end up slamming face-first, eyes-wide-open into a brick or concrete wall. Short-lived little dreams, yeah, but they’d jar me awake so violently that I’d almost tear my stitches loose. And man, that was exhausting!

The second effect turned out to be really wild and weird, but didn’t involve dreaming. See, I’d brought along a couple of books to keep me entertained during my stay. One was a paperback anthology of humorous literature. In that one, I began reading one titled “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” a James Thurber short story.” Right from the get-go, I found it myself thinking, Wow, this is pretty cool, so funny! Another page or two into it, it had become outright hilarious, and I was giggling after every paragraph. I couldn’t get over just how damn funny Thurber actually is, you know? And then for some reason, my giggling wouldn’t stop. It was like the babble of a brook, just… on-going. And then…it started getting louder. Sounding more like the low roar of a river than a brook. Shit, man, I was crazy-giggling… I don’t know how else to put it. I mean, yeah, this was one of the funniest stories I’d ever rea in my damn life but somehow I’d gotten stuck in an endless loop. it just wouldn’t stop tickling my funny-bone. I couldn’t stop it. I mean, where were the brakes on this book? I was out-of-control in a world of Can’t-stop-it hilarity! Down-and-out gut-busting, hoo-ha gasping guffaws! Tears-in-my-eyes, snot-running-outta-my-nose, laughing-gas laughter! Sobbing, cackling, wheezing… demented! Help,-somebody-please-come-and-STOP-me… madness!

The two nurse angels of mercy (might have helicoptered down to into my jungle of unreality) began trying to wrench the toxic tome from me, but my iron hands would not be unclamped. I’d become a Charlton Heston. “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” Momentarily , they were successful at managing to bend one finger back at a time…

They laid me down. They inspected my stitches. They told me to try to calm down. They told me I could have the book back later. “Now, you go to sleep now, alright?” I told them, OK. So they bid me goodnight. And before you could blink,I did fall asleep, totally exhausted. And I was swept right off to La-La-Land where, minutes later, I pedaled myself straight into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour!

On the morning of my final Percodan tablet, taken minutes before, my roommate suggested, “Let’s you and me take us a little walk.” Me being the Cowardly Lion, I cautioned that that probably wouldn’t be such a great idea, it being that we hadn’t been granted permission to stray from our room. By now, however, we were allowed to walking to and fro from the bathroom on our own but, still, I didn’t think…

Well, I wasn’t being paid to think, he countered, and come on, wasn’t I getting sick of being confined to those same lousy four walls too? And of course, I was. We donned bathrobes and hospital slippers. “But not too far,” I cautioned, to which he explained that it was only a matter of a few steps to the elevator. So OK. We stuck our heads out the door, scouted the hallway and, minutes later, pressed the elevator’s “Up” button.

“Let’s go right to the top, the penthouse suites.” And so up we went. And I’m guesstimating the was institution comprised a dozen floors at least. The elevator doors slid open. We peeked out. A low key kind of floor. Less busy than ours. Our kind of floor. We left the lift and shuffled straight across the hallway right into the first room we’d laid eyes on. Unoccupied, yes. Both beds made. Identical to our own downstairs, of course.

The view however, unlike ours, was gorgeous. We were at the top of the world. All sunshine and blue sky. Off to our left lay the shoreline of the beautiful blue Atlantic. Below us, the cityscape. All little streets and side-roads and intersections with toy cars and trucks crawling this way and that, stopping at streetlight intersections and moving on. We were looking for interesting landmarks.

And then we spotted one. The Golden Arches! Mickey D’s! Oh yes! “OK. I’m having the Big Mac meal” he told me. “Want me to pick you up a happy meal?”

“I dunno. Better than the jello and custard we’ve been eating. What toys come with’em this month?”

“Does it matter?”

“Nope. Just hurry back soon? You know I can’t stand the fries when they get col… oh, JESUS!”

Somebody’s loose kite just wafted right up out of nowhere to our window on an updraft of the wind outside, and began hanging there, at a tilt, a matter of inches in front of our very eyes!

“Holy shit!” my roommate added. “That’s a… That’s a… fuckin’ seagull!” And it was, that’s exactly what it was, beady little idiot eyes glaring straight through that window into ours, hooked-beak-to-noses! Hanging airily like a Casper the Flying Ghost balloon on the other side of the glass!

“Oh, wow, man…”

“Yeah.”

“Look at’im! Is he for real?” I mean, somehow, he was remaining just pinned right there in the middle of the air like some fake, yet realistic 3-D display.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I wanna know… like, just how the hell did he even know we were even gonna be up here anyway?”

And it was such a stupid, dumbass, and illogical question that I just laughed right out loud. And my laugh mad him laugh, and… well… that and the fact that I suddenly farted. And Jesus, that’s all it took, it was as simple as that. The giggles began. And the giggles didn’t stop . And oh no, before you could even find the brakes, it was already too late,we were laughing our asses off! Laughing way too loud, both of us, a somehow very strained and muscular laughter but at the same time, the hilarious laughter of little girls at a late night sleepover. And damn, I just knew the Big One was coming, I could feel it, grumbling up there like a winter’s worth of snow starting its grinding, gravitational slide down the roof, wave after wave of it. And then it hit! Both of us this time. Both at once. THE RAPTURE OF THE LAUGHTERS FROM THE RAFTERS! Avalanching down on top of us, burying us alive, smothering, suffocating us! Both of us this time.

Thankfully, a party of three nurses, clucking like a trio of petulant hens, found us. Down on our knees. White-knuckled fingers clamped desperately to the sill, hanging there, sniveling, a pair of snot-nosed, giggle-sobbing bats. Suffering lockjaw from the hard bellowing.

Emergency wheelchairs were rolled in, the “patients” expertly installed into those and then whisked back to the waiting elevator. The “down” button was pressed. (And man, didn’t we need our “down” buttons pressed.) And so down we went. Back down to our shared room, to be put to bed. A couple of naughty little boys. And the contingent of white-coated superiors who summarily “debriefed” them.

Yes, that Percodan was pretty powerful and mighty stuff! I’d never heard of it in the ‘70s until then, and I was surprised, (well, not so surprised, not really) to Google it and find out it is a combination of oxycodone and aspirin. I guess the surprise is that I was doing oxy’s way back then.

The laughter episodes herein can sound pretty funny. But the truth is, there was something very unfunny about it. That being that the uncontrolled, unstoppable laughing was a lot like having a terminal case of the hiccoughs from hell. Percodan, coupled with a innocuously humorous moment, triggered it, but there was the danger of not being able to untrigger it. It became more of an very unfunny seizure, actually. It was an exhausting experience…

So yeah, I find the workings of our brains interesting. Always have. Speaking of which I do, by the way, have a couple more “hospital anecdotes” lined up to add which, I believe, are purely humorous and true. I plan to share in these in “ALTERED STATES II. And if you feel you might be interested, please join me in this next episode of NEARING THE END OF THE LINE, coming out in approximately a week from now.

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