|
2004-08-23 I will tell you what. Vicodin is not the drug for me. Pamprin? Totally. Flatulex? Oh yes. PCP? Without a doubt. Those drugs make me a better person, and, in the case of PCP, better able to cook a baby in a frying pan and have no recollection of doing so the next day. Vicodin, however, makes my body hallucinate odd discomforts: my eyes attempt to hump their way out of my sockets like slow, well-satiated slugs; my head becomes too heavy for my neck and lolls with abandon; my skin turns the color of unfortunately bleached hair. It is in my best interests to crawl everywhere. I should have thought of all this before I decided to faint in church and crack my rib on an organ bench. It happened this way. I was cantoring Mass, as I do every Saturday, and I noticed that I was needing to take many more breaths to sing “Behold the Wood” than I normally do. (True, “Behold the Wood” is a song that takes one’s breath away, but religious devotion can only be carried so far before a person decides to start licking on lepers and/or fainting on organ benches.) I have fainted in church before; unfortunately, our church members are not very well acquainted with the Holy Spirit and his great delight in making people fall down, so my fainting is viewed as an anomalous medical problem. “I need to sit down,” I whispered to the organist, who nodded wearily and pointed to the floor. I kneeled down on the carpet next to the organ while the other singers (all healthy, unspiritual people) went to Communion, and when they returned to sing the Communion hymn I attempted to stand. This was a silly idea, because the next thing I knew I was sprawled out on the floor staring at the ceiling, a hideous pain cutting its teeth on my high right ribs. Now, I have perfected the art of the graceful faint, so I usually don’t hurt myself when I fall. Therefore my father, who was saying Mass—I’ll explain later, much later—assumed I was fine, and directed Communion traffic around my prone, shivering body. “She’s okay!” he shouted cheerfully. “She faints all the time! Just walk around her!” However, since I had crashed bone-first into an enormous wooden bench on my way down, I was not fine. I was having trouble breathing, and my teeth had started to chatter. “I think my rib is hurt,” I said to no one in particular, and passed out again. By the time I woke up, Mass had ended, and a small crowd had gathered around me. Someone had put one of our five-pound, hardback hymnals underneath my head as a makeshift pillow. (End Times, here we come.) A woman wearing a white dress and a transparent white hat dashed up to us and asked, “Is it all right if I pray over her? May I pray over this girl?” “Whatever,” I replied generously, with great effort. She held out her hands over me and talked out loud to Jesus for an uncomfortably long time. Obviously this woman had never even heard of the Spirit and his knock-down drag-out ways. The Professor arrived from nowhere, reinforcing my belief that he is not a real human but some kind of Bot who pedals through the universe’s various wormholes, and he and my father carried me to the car in an extremely awkward way. In my opinion, a father should not be allowed near his daughter’s armpits once she is past the age of six. “Well, your rib didn’t puncture your lung!” the doctor announced. “Oh, I must be leaking from some other place, then,” I said, hissing through my teeth and pretending the noise wasn’t coming from me. Because why? Because I had already taken my Vicodin. And the rest is history. My rib is bruised or cracked—apparently the doctor doesn’t take the time to determine which, as long as a lung isn’t punctured—and I am full of painkillers. I am told that some people take this drug recreationally. Come on, now. I couldn’t even sauté a baby on this shit.
|
