As I lay in the torpor of Morpheus, a long-unravelled silver cord ravelled itself home.
It didn't come on gradually. I was resting comfortably in my bed and fading youth, the last day of my 44th year, when I rolled over
fade in blues riff, a la LeadBelly - cue Scratchy Muffled Victrola and Crossroads Catgut Guitar:
the way I'm sleepin', my back and shoulder's tired
way I'm sleepin babe, my back and shoulder's tired
think I'll roll over and try it on this side
into a mantrap. Sprung the tongue, I had, maybe with my elbow, and spring-powered rusted metal teeth clamped onto my side, a penetrating vise of teeth, digging through soft flesh and fat into sinew and organ. FUCK! It clamped down hard just below my leftern rib cage to just above my hip bone, gouging a channel across and through my belly, into soft groin and testical, GOD DAMN!, sucking in breath, a cramping, stabbing, razor-sharp and toothache-dull canyon through my core. I thought I had pulled something, and tried to sit up, but FUCK! the goddamn thing was chained to the bed.
I guess this is how kidney stones come on. One moment I was a happy mouse, childlike joy on my chubby little cheeks as I lovingly nibbled a tiny flower, and the next moment the beast was on me, all horrible claws and teeth. There was a moment, after I tried to sit up and failed, that a very clear memory of the way I had felt just seconds before flashed like a projection on the inside of my forehead as the delicate petals of my flowery-snack wafted to the floor. My last meal? The meal I'll never shit out. The foul breath of the beast fills my nose, reeking; my mouth, stinging; my throat, burning; my lungs, aching. The sweet sickly smell of the meat of its last few days' victims rotting between its teeth, and a worser smell from deep down in its guts. I could not decide whether that brief vision-flash memory of painlessness was a mercy to cling to or a cruel trick of mocking nature. Beyond profanity, I retched out the vowelless sound. I hope you never hear it, let alone utter it.
You just sort of lay there waiting for a bit, thinking; What the hell is that? , expecting it to go away. It makes no sense. You don't realize it's an ebb in the pain until SWHCKK! your world becomes a series of bright white flashes and randomly magnified snapshots of your surroundings alternated with concrete unreal visions, a broken staccato over the string section's underlying allegros and crescendos of pain. A Calico Cat in a Tuxedo Whips his foot-long Fangs like a Conducor's Baton. SWHCKK!! A Lampshade and a Desk, forty feet tall. SWHCKK!! A Television Commercial for Shoes that Shape a woman's Butt just by Walking. SWHCKK!! SWHCKK! SWHCKK!!
An Ebb as the cellist's bow wanes, and you think of the ancient Chinese custom of foot-binding, how you had read that it had been diabolically designed by Monstrous Omnipotent Dynasts (MODs) to strengthen and firm a woman's vaginal canal, feet bound over in half, so tiny, as to force a woman to walk in such a way that it exercised SWHCKK!! Yo-Yo Ma's Horsehair Rakes the Strings again. That's right. You forgot, and tried to sit up again.
Pain is sort of like LSD. You never really come down, you just get used to being that way. Eventually, you can sort of manage the flashbacks, light trails, and visions - not that they get any less intense, but you can manage not to visibly freak out in public when a purple monkey with a Fez and a bottle of Ouzo pops out from behind the cash register. I look at the people around me, and wonder what they're seeing.
So yeah. I had quit smoking, cold turkey, four days before. I was over the three-day hump. It was going to be OK. I had fought off cravings with martinis, chocolate, cocktail onions, jalepenos, food and exercise. I don't think quitting is as hard as we make it out to be - maybe that's a clever subterfuge by Big Tobacco to make us think it's impossible to quit.
The pain came on around 2 or 3 AM. Actually managed to shower and dress and go to work, not realizing it might be a stone until I'd been there for an hour and a half, whereupon I of course Googled it. Sure as shit, there was a diagram of a Vitruvian Woman with a shaded area right exactly outlining the pain in my guts....a subnote that said "The pain is far worse in men than it is is women, possibly spreading to a testicle..." It also mentioned that it's the only natural pain comparable to chilbirth. Kudos, Mom. So I went back home.
I tried to tough it out for a few hours, being a tough guy and all, but finally couldn't take any more and drove myself to the emergency room. I must have been driving erratically, because a State Trooper picked up my scent and tailgated me for about three miles, until I turned off into the hospital parking lot.
fade in somnolent electric guitar, a la Springsteen or Johnny Cash - cue Scraping Highway Noises and Sucking Breath Sounds:
Mister State Trooper
Please don't stop me
Please don't stop me
Please don't stop me
Maybe you got kids
Maybe you got a pretty wife
The only thing that I've got
Been plaguin' me my whole life
I tried to think of something clever to say in case I got pulled over, like; "You should see the other guy's urethra", but the clever lever just wasn't there. I know, I know, never try to joke with the officer. They've heard it all. I'm a computer geek, and you CANNOT IMAGINE how tired I am of having someone ask me "What'd ya break now?" I imagined myself spending the night in jail, crying like a little bitch on a hard concrete bench, while caring fellow inmates rattle the bars with tin cups, berating the cops for not getting me medical attention, and managed not to get pulled over.
Now, I haven't been to an emergency room for myself in fifteen years, as referenced in 'I don't know when I fell but I love it down here...'. Maybe it's just Arizona, but the service in hell has definitely gotten worse. I was about twelve hours in to hallucinatory-level pain, and somehow managed to produce three insurance cards and fill out or sign at least a dozen forms. The Triage dude came out and saw me in about five minutes, and set me back in the waiting area, where I proceeded to writhe in agony IN PUBLIC for about an hour and a half. Not that I would have minded if they had been taking in trauma victims ahead of me - but thirty of us waited for a good hour and a half while they called nobody before they came and got me. I don't know. Maybe they were bringing serious cases in through the back.
Anyway, they finally called me and a pleasant nurse named Graciella chatted me up, hospital-robed me, and bunked me. Things started happening quickly now. Got an IV tube, a quick chat with a pretty redheaded doctor, and some Dilaudid for starters. In about half an hour, Graciella asked me if the pain was gone, and I said it mostly was, but she gave me something stronger without a second's hesitation. What a great bartender in this joint. What is stronger than Dilaudid, anyway? The second shot made it able for me to doze, and for a while I was a happy little mouse again. Visits from friends and loved ones pleasantly punctuated my dozing, as did a CT scan and subsequent release with a number of prescriptions. Strange visit to the pharmacy, and back home, to about 24 hours of Percocett-haze, copious amounts of water, and countless feeble attempts at urination. And torment.
Rough cut into Jimmy Hendrix, Purple Haze - cue Psychadelic Montage:
Percocett Haze
All in my braaaayn
Lately things, they don't s|||||||Needle Scratches Across Vinyl
Rough cut into Neil Young- cue Desert Psychadelic Montage:
I seen the needle and the damage done
A little pice of it in ev'ryone
gone, gone the dam|||||||Needle Scratches Across Vinyl
Rough cut to close-up of Lou Reed- cue Rainy Urban Psychadelic Montage behind him:
Lou Reed opens his mouth to sing, but The Beatles' Brass Horn Crescendo from A Day in the Life comes out of his mouth instead.
We twist-zoom into his open mouth, and shock-pan out to silence and sunlight shining on me in bed.
Around sunset on my birthday, about 40 hours after I rolled into the mantrap, I awoke to relativlely no pain. Doreen and Freddie, from whom I rent a room, made tacos for my birthday dinner, gave me the funniest little card, and served up a Cherries Jubilee ice-cream cake from Baskin Robbins. I was sore as hell, but was sure that the source of the pain was gone. At some point during the tacos, part of a tooth fell out. Happy 45th! NOW YOU'RE OLD! Kidney stones and dentures for you!
The hangover from the prescription heroin made work impossible the next day, although, once again, I showered, dressed and drove there. I didn't get out of the car, though. Drove straight back home. The next 24 hours were horrible, sore as hell, constipated, with the worst headache I've ever had, my poor little mouse-carcass rotting in the desert sun, but in no way as awful as the day before. That was Friday. On Saturday, I was actually able to perform a little landscaping work in the yard and actually went in to work to fix the voice mail system that night. Had Sunday morning mimosas with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a bloody mary and a couple of beers, enjoyed about ten minutes of football, (which I normally don't enjoy at all), and rested well. Still in the throes of my heroin hangover a tiny bit, I managed to work a full day today, get my projects back on track, and shake the depression and despair that had wept me through the night.
It is still Monday. Shortly before lunch, life got interesting.
I was up in Accounting and one of the girls there cornered me. I thought she must be having a computer problem, but instead, she asked, "Are you into Wicca? Are you a Medium?" I blinked.
You see, her Mother had died Wednesday night. She dreamed that night that I was standing on both sides of a river, wearing pants of the same Olive Green material as the shirt I was currently wearing, and a shirt that, from her description, was a sort of multi-autumncolored dashiki with long flowing sleeves, open at the neck. The shirt immediately reminded me of the stained glass barrier i had passed through many years before during my first and only structured execution of astral projection. I had channeled the dead once before and have a couple of times since, but that particular time I had trained my senses for thirty days, thrice each day visiting several stations I had set up, each with a particular series of triggers consisting of a taste (e.g. cinnamon), a smell (e.g. bay leaf), a sound (e.g. a bell), a distinct touch sensation (e.g. sandpaper) and a sight (e.g. a square of red cloth). I had not known at that point to include a secret symbol of my own creation. At the end of the thirty days, during which time I had read the complete works of Arthur C. Clark and learned of the newspaperman's term thirty being a term for death from both one of his short stories and a crossword puzzle on the same day, I went to sleep, as the text instructed, but paid attention. I floated away, penetrated the stained-glass barrier, heard the roar of a great beast I could only guess was a large cat, a black panther, to be exact, which I learned the next morning the entire West-Texas barrio neighborhood had heard that night, followed a loosely-gripped silver cord through starry space to a dense forest with a path that I followed to a grassy plain, which I crossed to a waist-high mortar-and-stone wall that stretched to the horizon in both directions. A pretty woman with long dark hair was leaning on the wall. As I stood before her, she smiled in an unnerving way and slowly closed here eyes. An eye blinked open on the middle of her forehead, frightening me so badly that I whipped back through across the landscapes and space to my body. I was frightened badly, and never tried that again.
Here, now, perhaps twenty-five years later, on the first Monday of my forty-fifth year, I stood near the microwave oven in the accounting department of a Nevada casino, as Christine, who I know only in passing, told me of her dreams in earnest. As I've said, in her first dream, I stood on both sides of a river. Being on both sides of the river, I ushered her mother across to the other side, all the while speaking in a chorus of many voices in strange languages. Christine was convinced that I was the only way her mother could pass over.
fade up quietly, to about 1/3rd volume, to The Beatles and Ravi Shankar Citar - cue Singing Cicadas and Distant Traffic Noises.
relax, unplug your mind and float downstreammmmmmmmmmm
mmmmmmthis is not dyyyyying
this is not dyyyyying
Lay down all thought, Surrender to the void
It is shininggggg It is shininggggggg
That you may see The meaning of within
It is beingggggg It is beingggggg
That love is all And love is everyone
It is knowinggggggg It is knowingggggg
That ignorance and hate May mourn the dead
It is believinggggggg It is believingggggggg
But listen to the color of your dreams
It is not livinggggggg It is not livingngggggg
Or play the game existence to the end
Of the beginningggggg Of the beginningggggggg Of the beginningggggggg Of the beginninggggggg Of the beginningngggggg
Of the beginning
fade up to office noises - cue Cubical Office Accounting Personnel Milling By in Tight Quarters. Do they hear what we are saying? :
The next night, Thursday, the night my stone had passed, she dreamt me at the river again, this time, only on one side of it, on her side of it, yet I was able to let her cross and speak with her mother in her dream, who spoke to her in a strange language, but with a single voice, a strange language which she could somehow understand.
I have channeled the dead perhaps three or four times in my life, that I am aware of, each time incorporating into myself a part of the deceased party. I always feared that it was damaging to me. Only today did I realize that I had left parts of myself with them as well. Today, I feel whole again. It could explain alot. I am sighted in the land of the blind, but wretched amongst the sighted, from whence I hail.
I will flesh this out with a better narrative in future, but now it is after midnight and I have a 4AM call.
- cue Tomorrow.
-30-