 | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  |
by Joe Pachinko
The screaming was what woke me up. The procedure hadn’t taken very long, three,
maybe four hours tops. Long enough for me to go out and buy groceries, come back, try
to get excited about a month old copy of the LADIES HOME JOURNAL and fall asleep
in the plastic surgeon’s waiting room. The waiting room confused me. All of the crap in
it was obviously expensive, but none of it seemed to match. Ming vases, bronze cowboy
sculptures, old English furniture, shag carpeting, a painting of “The End of the Trail”
featuring an Indian brave so bent over on his horse he could just about suck his own
dick. The screaming was my friend Eddie. I had agreed to look out for him on a trip to
Tijuana to get a radical double mastectomy but there had been some wheeling and
dealing and now we were in Oklahoma City for the same procedure. I could hear the
doctor yelling “HOLD STILL DAMMIT! DON’T MOVE!” And more screaming. When
the noise died down the receptionist gave me the O.K. to go back. Eddie was on a
gurney, hooked up to an EKG and yelling “IT FUCKING HURTS!” over and over. The
anesthesiologist laughed and said “I’d sure be real surprised if it didn’t hurt. Heh heh.”
“IT FEELS LIKE SHIT!”
“Well, that is a true statement,” the anesthesiologist said.
“Shit man.” I said. “My boobs are bigger than yours now fucker.”
“Don’t make me laugh asshole,” he said laughing. “IT FUCKING HURTS!”
They had given him some Demerol pills but the pills hadn’t kicked in yet and part of
the deal was we were supposed to get out now that the operation was over. Eddie was
still yelling and claiming he couldn’t move his legs. The anesthesiologist finally agreed
to shoot him up with some more Demerol. At this point he had enough of the shit in his
system to make a sleeping elephant think it was up on its back legs doing the watusi.
“GIVE ME MORE PAIN MEDICATION! IT STILL FUCKIN’ HURTS!” he said.
“If I give you any more you’ll stop breathing. The police don’t like that.”
It finally took the anesthesiologist, a nurse, and me to get him out of there
and into the rental car. They basically shoved him in the car with a bottle of pills, and
instructions to leave. “And here’s your barf bucket,” the nurse told me.
“We’ve got one, thanks,” I said.
“You’re going to NEED a barf bucket!” she insisted.
“I know. The doctor gave me one, and instructions.”
“You TAKE THIS!” and she shoved the auxiliary barf bucket into my hands. It wasn’t
much, more of a clear plastic salad bowl, but it didn’t have any barf in it yet.
We found the freeway. We made it through mid-city to I-40 and were on our way back
to our sinister plastic motel. Eddie had finally passed out and was snoring. In addition
to that he was visibly bandaged around his whole upper chest, completely wasted on
Demerol, and had a plastic pump bottle hanging by a tube from the stitches to collect
blood from the cavity left by the surgery. The blood pump was working, I could see that.
He looked like he’d been hit by a truck. It was also only 2:00 in the afternoon and I
suddenly realized the seriousness of the situation. The light shone on me through the
dirty windshield of the most obvious flag waving fagmobile west of Keokuk. I had
reserved a rent-a-car in advance, with a guaranteed rental of a sedate four door sedan,
totally non-descript. When we walked up to the rent-a-car agency at the OKC Airport
things had changed; “Walll, we’re just plumb out a them compacts...we got a nice
cruiser for ya though, and it’s the very last one too.” It looked like a big purple
suppository with wheels. One of those things that look like a toy Hot Wheels car with
the ass end stuck up in the air and the front end snurfling along the ground, by itself
that wasn’t so bad, but it was a magnificently gay bright purple metal flake with tinted
windows. The only thing missing was a rainbow gay pride flag waving off the aerial. Not
particularly low key in Metropolitan Oklahoma City where anyone not driving a pickup
truck is a suspected deviant. Add to that the illegal surgery. Oklahoma is one of many
proud states where it’s legal to refuse transsexuals medical care. A double edged sword.
The surgeon makes money on the side doing illegal surgery, if he fucks up you can’t
complain. No post operative care makes it cheaper, and everything’s fine as long as you
don’t start hemorrhaging and have to go to a hospital. This hadn’t all really dawned on
me until I was barreling down I-40 at 82 miles per hour with a zonked out post op
tranny next to me in a bright purple fagmobile headed for the “VALUE PLACE”. Not a
hotel, not a motel, just a “PLACE”.
Eddie had found the “place” online and liked the price, which was cheap, and the rooms
had kitchenettes with microwave ovens in them. Everything a nice non-committal sand
color. A good place to hide out. Just off the Tinker Diagonal in Del City, right next door
to a haunted abandoned go-cart track, a liquor store, a convenience mart, a sprinkling
of unfinished construction sites, and a shitload of rundown housing projects. Good view
of the freeway. A nice place to raise your kids. Or make money off of them, or failing
that, eat them. Checking in the day before had been a non-educational retarded ordeal.
The front desk clerk, Clyde, was some kind of subnormal Okie degenerate Mr. Roger’s
neighborhood type in an ugly baby blue sweater who had no idea how to operate a
computer, and no idea of how to fake it. He kept pushing the mouse around in circles,
like if he did it fast enough the friction would light a spark for a boy scout jamboree fire
and he’d get some kind of obscure computer mouse fire starting merit badge. Like
people hitting the elevator button again when it’s already on to speed the elevator up.
“Waal,” he said, “we have your registration, but the e-mail’s been down for about six
days and we don’t have your credit card info.”
“We made the reservations a month ago,” Eddie said.
“Well I can see THAT! But we don’t have all the information through the e-mail yet...
um,” he moved the mouse around vigorously. “Nope. We definitely didn’t get the credit
card info. I mean, we’ve got it, but I can’t SEE it,” more mouse shuffling, “I mean, we
don’t want yaul to get charged TWICE on yer card an all.”
“But you haven’t charged us ONCE yet,” Eddie said.
“Waal I um, we can check you in no problem. I just don’t want to you know...um, what
are yaul here in town for anyway?”
“We’re here to fuck goats,” I offered.
“What?”
“Visiting friends.”
“Where your friends from?
“All over.”
“What you plannin’ on doin when you see em’”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Why Oklahoma City?”
“I always liked it here.” Eddie said.
There was a long list of rules which included things like no leaving children
unattended; no operating barbecue grills inside the rooms, no sunbathing, no feeding
stray animals, no displaying articles of clothing outside your studio, etc. Also you
couldn’t refuse the weekly maid service, or not take out your garbage. They were clearly
not expecting a very sophisticated clientele. Under the circumstances, there was no way
on god’s blue meatball I was going to drag Eddie in past the front desk and Clyde.
Despite the fact that the place radiated paranoia like skunk jism there was an
unattended side entrance. I parked next to it and got Eddie out of the car. I let go of him
to insert the key card into the door, got the door open and turned around to see him
halfway across the parking lot, weaving around disoriented with his blood pump
swinging around his thighs.
We got up to his room unseen somehow, and he passed out as soon as he hit the bed. I
went up the hall to my room, ate some xanax and poured myself a drink. The air
conditioner worked and I had a magnificent view of freeway 270. The kitchenette
counter was covered with canned fruit, cup noodles, bottle of rum, plastic forks. We had
reconnoitered the Tinker Mart the night before. One of the most forlorn convenience
marts I had ever seen. Almost nothing on the shelves without a sad coating of greasy
dust. When Eddie asked the cashier if he had any vegetarian frozen burritos he replied
“There’s beef and bean burritos. They got beans in em’. Those are vegetarian.” There
was only one beef and bean burrito in the refrigerator case. Neither of us bought it. We
took the three cans of fruit cocktail, and Eddie bought some bags of pumpkin seeds with
a drawing of a pumpkin seed on the bag flexing its muscles and proclaiming “I’M
GOOD!” as if compensating for a low self –esteem problem, like “I REALLY AM GOOD!
HONEST!” The nutrition facts listed a sodium content of 136% of your daily
requirement. And they were one of the least dangerous looking items in the store. I
went into the liquor mart next door. The place looked like a bomb shelter, barbed wire
and bars over the one window. The glass held together with duct tape. The cashier kept
one hand under the counter while I stood in awe before the largest selection of wino
wine I had ever seen. There was fortified wine in every imaginable color, including blue
and green. They had strange brands of beer there. I bought a bottle of rum and a six
pack and got out.
Eddie’s room was destroyed. There were clothes and various shit everywhere and he
had thrown up in the trash can.
“When did you take your last pill?”
“I don’t know. Is it time to go back to the doctor?”
“Tomorrow. Take your goddam pill.”
The drain pump was full of blood. They had shown me how to drain it at the doctor’s
office. It was simple. Just pop the cap and squeeze the blood out into a bowl. I placed
the pump over one of the barf bowls and gently popped the cap. Blood exploded all over
everything. Black blood and pus, lymphatic fluid, my hands looked like the hands of
Orlac, covered. I took the bowl into the bathroom and flushed and washed.
I set my alarm and checked on him every two hours. They had cable TV and I found a
movie channel. Around 4:00 in the morning some safari movie with Ava Gardner was
on. It was all about her ass. Every shot, every scene with her in it the camera was
focused on her ass. It was in the middle of every shot. It was hilarious. I was cracking up
about it when the alarm went off. I made my way out into the hall. Even at 4:00 a.m. the
halls were full of people. Wandering around, talking to the walls. There were 12 golf
courses in Oklahoma City, but these folks would never tee off on any of them.
Discocephalic rednecks in plastic baseball hats with underage girlfriends and crying
children, zombie extras from the Night of the Living dead, an old black man pushing a
shopping cart full of trash. The key card for Eddie’s room didn’t work. I tried it every
which way, made sure it wasn’t my key but it had been zapped somehow. Back in my
room I tried the front desk, they closed at 6:00, but there was an emergency number.
The emergency number got me Darla. Darla was a tenant who handled the night
emergencies, and she looked like she COULD handle the night emergencies. About 250
pounds of don’t fuck with me born again Jesus freak, and she gave me a new key card
for Eddie’s room. I thanked her profusely in the name of Jesus. Full of optimism I tried
the new key, and it didn’t work either. So I repeated the process. When I finally got back
into Eddie’s room, he was yelling and thrashing. I took one of the pills, cracked it open
and dumped the powder in his mouth.
“There’s still some left,” I said.
“I don’t want it. You take it.” I took it, emptied the drain pump, and waited until he was
asleep again. Out in the hall the freeway looked as if it was coming in the windows, the
car headlights streaming disembodied down the hall. The guy with the shopping cart
was still pushing without getting anywhere. People were still having conversations with
the walls.
Back in my room my tongue was numb from the Demerol. I looked out the window and
saw two police cars out front with their lights spinning. The clock showed 5:30 in the
morning. I lit a cigarette.
The red brick houses and the dead dry withered yellow lawn grass of Oklahoma City
stretched away in all directions under the hot rain and angry wind. After two days
sleepless I was driving out Reno Ave, looking for a decent food market. 45 minutes of
driving and nothing but cowboy dive bars, a WALMART and a Cloaca Loca Taco stand
between empty lots full of scared weeds. I pulled into a church parking lot to turn
around. Weeds two feet high grew through the cracked pavement. The roof of the
church was missing, one wall was half crumbled, and trash was scattered over
everything. The sign proclaimed the LIVING WORD OF CHRIST MISSION. No place
ever looked as dead.
Lightning cracked in the distance as I pulled into the DISCOUNT FOOD WORLD
parking lot. Two women with four children piled into an old junker next to me. The car
alarm went off when they started the car. They were obviously accustomed to this and
backed out and drove away with the alarm still squonking and beeping. A local
newspaper in a rack outside the store bore the headline “CATTLE RUSTLERS TWICE
AS BUSY AS LAST YEAR”. “How the fuck did I end up here” I thought as I wandered
the aisles. The hot dog section was 30 feet long. I had no idea there were that many
different kinds of hot dogs. Laid end to end they would reach all the way back to THE
VALUE PLACE. Eddie had given me a shopping list which included alien dream food
items like frozen quiche. He wouldn’t be getting that here. I was lucky to find frozen
pizza and canned soup. Granola bars.
There was a liquor store down the road that had real wine in quantity. I wanted to buy a
corkscrew. The lady behind counter told me it was illegal for them to sell me one, but
she could give me one which she did.
The phone rang. I got out of bed and answered it. It was Eddie.
“What time is it?” he demanded.
“Time for you to get a watch fucker. It’s 3:22.”
“Is it time for me to take my pill yet?”
“Not yet. Is it hurting?”
“No.”
“Then go back to sleep and I’ll wake you up when it’s time, O.K.?”
“O.K.”
I looked at my broken typewriter. Got up and threw a frozen pizza in the microwave. I
had been channel surfing on the T.V. trying to find good looking women to jack off to,
but out of 60 channels all they would show was men. If a woman appeared, the camera
would jump back immediately to the guys and linger there. The guys were constantly
making homophobic remarks, and teasing each other about being gay, and ignoring the
women and it struck me then how completely homoerotic mainstream television is.
Forget about sports. Even the comedies, the “reality” shows, the movies, the news were
obsessively focused on men. It was some kind of love-hate super fag fest that would
totally annihilate you for noticing it. I hadn’t watched television seriously in a long time.
I finally settled on some submarine movie from the 50’s that had one actual woman (a
scientist) inside the submarine with all the men. At one point two men were trapped in a
flooding compartment of the sub and the scientist lady yells “TOM! HARRY!” (the
trapped men’s’ names) into the radio transmitter. A man walks up to her and shouts
“GIVE ME THAT!” grabs the radio away from her and yells into it “TOM! HARRY!” I
turned it off and went down the hall to give Eddie his pill.
“Where ya goin?” Clyde asked me.
“Bass fishing Clyde.”
“Bass fishin’?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve got a Texas rigged, scuppernong flavored lipless crankbait I want to
try rakin’ across the salad. Of course I’m not altogether
positive I shouldn’t bump one of them Fukuoka-Okazaki jelly worms over the hump.
But then again you never know if a trout colored swim bait or an Okeechobee-rigged
jitterbug might work just as well if you’re draggin’ across the main point. Although there’
s just about nothing beats crankbait.”
“Crankbait?” Clyde stood there with his mouth open. I drove back to the liquor store.
There were two black swans floating dreamily around in the pond outside the doctor’s
waiting room window when I woke up. “Your friend seems to be doin’ just fine,” the
receptionist said to me. She was gorgeous.
“He’s tough,” she was better than anything I had seen on T.V. in three days besides
Ava Gardner’s ass. “You’re Darla?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Joe.”
“Oh I remember you,” the Okie accent was music. “You know the doctor is really very
good.”
“Oh, no doubt.”
“He’s giving me a facelift next month. I wouldn’t trust anybody else but him.”
“Darla, nobody I’ve ever seen was less in need of a facelift.”
“You’re so sweet, but I’m 53 and my husband’s 46. I guess I’m doing it for him. I have
to do something. Just this skin under my chin here, see? The doctor figures it’s good
advertising for his employees to have work done by him. Sorta show it off, you know?”
Then a woman walked in wanting information about Botox injections.
On the way back to the VALUE PLACE we stopped at Coit’s Root Beer Stand on
highway 74. The stand had menus and microphones where you parked so that car hops
could bring your order out to you.
“MAXI-BREAKFAST?” Eddie said, looking at the menu, “What the fuck’s that?”
“I just wonder if the maxi-pads are fresh,” I said. “You want a root
beer?” There was a 22 foot tall plywood Santa Claus standing at the edge of the parking
lot.
“Yeah. And some tater tots.”
The restaurant itself was inscrutably walled in with brown tinted glass.
“What do you suppose is going on inside there?” I asked.
“That’s probably where they’re interrogating the terrorists. Nobody would ever think of
looking for them there.”
“You sure you don’t want an “Onion Dog?”
“No thanks.”
“You know, if god didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?”
“Hot dogs aren’t made out of meat asshole.”
“Hell yes they are! They’re made out of assholes, scabs, testicles, tumors, pig penises,
ear lobes, bovine pituitary glands, beef clits...”
“You are what you eat.” I ordered a chicken fried steak sandwich, two root beers, and
two orders of tater tots. When we got back to the motel the chicken fried steak sandwich
was as big as my head and floating in a wading pool of mayonnaise. I couldn’t eat it and
turned on the T.V.
Things descended into a netherworldly blur. I liked it there. The american flags
weren’t screaming as loud there, the Oklahoma City poor didn’t seem as scared or
beaten down. The freeway construction looked like sculpture. I drove out to Guthrie to
look at some farmhouse a friend of mine back in Berkeley wanted to buy. Middle of
nowhere, the house was full of giant mutant wasps. The wasps kept diving at my head.
The outhouse had no door. There was an overwhelming feeling of nothingness
everywhere. Eddie and me were buying cigarettes at the Tinker mart when a burning car
pulled up outside. Flames shooting up from under the hood, black smoke billowing. A
woman got out. Walked in the store, bought a six-pack, walked out, got back into the
burning car and drove away past the haunted go-cart track. There was some plexiglass
display show room trailer in the VALUE PLACE parking lot with a new Jeep inside and a
mannequin guy with a mannequin german shepherd beside a plastic campfire and a lot
of fake plastic snow. I couldn’t figure out if they were actually trying to advertise there
or if they were just parking the thing. Finally Eddie’s old friend Harry (a beautiful
person) drove up helmet less from Cloacaville Texas on his motorcycle to relieve me
hallelujah and I fell asleep for two days.
The phone was ringing. I ignored it. This didn’t work. It never does. The phone
continued ringing. I fell out of bed onto the floor and crawled over to the desk.
“Yuh?”
“C’mon dude, you’re supposed to drive us to the casino.”
“Wuh?”
“Harry and me want to go to the casino out on the res. You said you’d take us.”
“Can’t Harry drive you?”
“You’re the only one who can drive the car, remember? Harry’s only got a motorcycle
which I can’t ride on because my stitches will rip out. You said you’d do it when you
were drunk ya fuckin’ monkey!”
“I did?”
“Yeah. And you forgot like you always do.”
“Are you sure you can gamble in your condition? Isn’t it dangerous for you to get too
excited?”
“Fuck that man! I’m sick of being in this fuckin’ hotel. I need to get out!”
“I’ll be right over.”
When I got down to their room it was full of black plastic smoke. The air conditioner
had caught on fire and they were fanning smoke out the window. “I just tried to turn the
heat on dude,” Eddie said.
The LUCKY STAR CONCHO casino was way the hell out of town. The freeway went on
forever in the dark. We were halfway to Texas or El Reno when we made the
reservation. No signs. They apparently didn’t want anybody finding the casino. After
getting lost and asking directions twice we found it. And it was the saddest casino I had
ever seen this side of Indian Burial Gulch. It was like being inside of a dirty giant ashtray
full of stinking rancid hotdogs that no one wanted to eat. No crap tables. There was
nothing to do there but chain smoke and lose money. I never saw so many one cent and
five cent slot machines, yet the place was full of people. Big spenders out for that $2.37
payoff. The restrooms were the most interesting feature and the restrooms weren’t very
interesting. I sat at the bar. All they served was lite beer, and they ran out of that by 9:
30. I wandered around until I found the guys playing dime slots.
“This is ridiculous shit man,” Harry said. “I can’t win enough on this machine to make
it worthwhile, and I can’t lose fast enough to quit. I’m just trying to run out of money,
and even THAT is taking forever.”
The house started announcing that it was giving away free coffee. Maybe afraid the
patrons would fall asleep at their slot machines. We left with our vouchers for 10 cents.
I think Eddie had a voucher for $1.81. We didn’t cash in.
The freeway back into Oklahoma City was empty, cold. There was half unfinished
construction everywhere. It looked as if the freeway was melting. Off ramps to nowhere.
Signs that said nothing. Darkness leaping away on both sides into the distance with
occasional sad lights.
The VALUE PLACE managed to gouge me and Eddie both an extra $45 bucks apiece
because we hadn’t notified them 24 hours in advance of our checking out. This in spite
of the fact that we had told Clyde when we would be leaving the day we checked in.
Another cheap scam. As I was leaving I said to Clyde...
“Clyde,” I said, “Next time I’ll give you 24 hours notice in addition to the 168 hours
notice I already gave you. And I’ll give you 72 hours notice too. And I’ll call and make
sure you’re alright with everything, and I’ll even bring you flowers except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Clyde asked.
“There isn’t going to be a next time Clyde.”
-------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author: Joe Pachinko is the Oakland area writer
responsible for Superstition Street Press and Granpa Stuped cartoons.