|
|
 |
Apriscatola
Apriscatola
6/22/08
|
Think back. Think long and think hard. Find your first memory.
Piaget described this development in several stages. In fact, just after being popped out of our mothers, our physiology makes us incapable of remembering anything during the first few years.
We call it a blank spot, and we all have one.
The frustration comes from realizing it exists—that there are years of your life you can't remember, and no matter how hard you try, you come back empty-handed, like Jack's loser brother who couldn't even haggle for magic beans. Knowledge is our biggest pain, so I ask you:
Think back. Think long and think hard. What do you remember? What if you filled in that blank spot? How far back would it go, and if you got to that point, that moment...would it be worth knowing what it is?
Because frustration comes from realizing it exists, but suffering comes from realizing what it is.
A man sits down in a hospital, sweating with fear. He stares at the clock in frustration. It's been over five hours, and he has been given no news. But no news is always good news...just frustrating news. Across from him is a man with nine fingers. To that man's left is a man with no teeth. Surely there must be some kind of story.
"So there must be some kind of story..."
A hospital waiting room is group therapy for the anxious. People can put down the Highlights magazine and open up to complete strangers.
The man with no teeth introduces himself as Leonard. He is tall and skinny with a mouth pushed together like two Jell-O molds fornicating in a vice. He is well-spoken, but that quality gets diminished when you realize he has no teeth. He slouches over, and with every long vowel muttered, his gums show. It's one way to kill the time, you know. Waiting with touristic curiosity for his gums to shine brightly. Like a demented aurora borealis.
I stare at his mouth and discover a pattern. His gum-shows become clockwork in the same way. With every long sound, like “greet” and “cheese,” comes an immaculate display of dental imperfection. It’s what I call second-tier time passing. I have no emotional investment in this event, but it’s a better way of wasting time than watching a clock. It’s like guessing the numbers as the lottery balls pop up even though I never bought a ticket.
I wait for it.
“Well I do have a story. One night, I went to go meet my friends for a beer.”
Success! Two in one sentence.
Leonard continues:
“I met some friends for beer two nights before I needed to go see my doctor.”
...three.
Leonard suffers from a disease called Sjögren's syndrome, which is an autoimmune disease that attacks exocrine glands which produce tears and saliva. Think of the saddest moment in your life and not being able to cry about it. That’s what Leonard does. But because he produces no saliva, he has excessive acid buildup in his mouth, which caused his teeth to rot from the inside out, like wood being consumed by termites. As a result, his teeth needed to be pried out of him to make way for implants.
“But I have to wait over a year for implants. It’s a long process.”
But he has to wait over a year for implants, because it’s a long process. The procedure needs to be done in phases. First, the tooth extraction. This is when the doctor rips each individual tooth out one by one. The problem is that ripping out a tooth creates a lot of blood, so this needs to be done in weekly intervals to prevent excessive blood loss, and for general healing purposes. Next comes phase two: after the tooth extraction comes the dental anchoring. These bolt-like objects get drilled into the gum-line so that the implants can be anchored into them. But this can only be done eight months after the extraction because the mouth needs a lot of time to heal. Finally, the implants get put in several months after the mouth has healed from the dental anchoring. Only three actual procedures, and 14 months of healing, and 18 months of soft food.
And Leonard is in phase two.
And his life partner is in intensive care.
18 months without sex isn’t nearly as bad as 18 months without teeth, but when you combine the two it can make hell look like a picnic with the Teletubbies (if you didn’t consider that hell. I know I wouldn’t.) But, there is an appeal to having no teeth. If your partner has no teeth, you can’t expect to feel teeth when they give you a blowjob. This is exactly what Leonard’s boyfriend expected. This was their silver lining, you see.
“He said it felt like sticking a dick in the warm sand right where the water met the beach,” Leonard says with regret.
But as expected, the problem wasn’t teeth for Leonard’s partner. The problem was acid built up in Leonard’s mouth, and because he was drinking beer with his friends two days before his doctor’s appointment, his mouth was extra acidy.
“He never complained before. He said he even enjoyed the tingling feeling.”
But what was unknown or neglected at the time was that the tingling was mouth acid seeping into the urethra. That slight tingling sensation that enhanced ejaculation was permeating through this man’s urinary tract, ultimately causing an infection which caused a pus-like discharge into Leonard’s toothless mouth.
“I thought it was cum for three days.”
And he thought it was cum for three days. He went down on his partner, with his eyes closed, sucking him off and assuming that he was just very good at oral sex. It wasn’t until Leonard made his boyfriend orgasm twice within 30 seconds of each other that he opened his eyes and understood what was happening. And why.
“I mean if you had your eyes closed and were sucking cock, and some warm liquid went into your mouth and you swallowed, what would you assume?”
It’s as logical of a deduction as any. But still:
Some guys stick metal rods up their urethras. This is called sounding. Leonard’s boyfriend uses bile acid. This is called...well something else.
“Pay attention.”
“Pay close attention.”
The nine fingered man introduces himself as Bill, but his friends call him Billiam.
And we call him Bill.
Bill raises his hand to introduce himself, to the people waiting patiently. To our therapy group for the anxious. It’s our silver lining, you see.
He’s missing his left ring finger, and it’s absolutely obvious. I’m sure it’s even more obvious to his fans, because he plays the keyboards in a tribute band called Fisted Sister. Well it would be more obvious if keyboardists in tribute bands had fans. Billiam gets rather enraged that Leonard says he’s in a cover band. There is evidently a difference between the two. And because we don’t know: We call him Bill.
“It’s a new adjustment. This is a recent thing, and I can’t do chords easily. My triads always become augmented or diminished. I’m just not used to this, ya know?”
I can’t talk right now, but Leonard can.
“Yeah, I know.”
As I sit and contemplate what a triad could be, after digesting a story about pus facials, Bill begins to talk about his life. About his past. About what led him up to this point.
Bill works as a private investigator. But Bill makes his living by looking. He looks at things he wants, and then takes them through rather...questionable avenues.
Bill made his 15 minutes of fame on the Sally Jesse Raphael show. It was a show about babysitters getting caught on camera doing rather...questionable things. One video you may remember was about a babysitter stealing over $5,000 while the parents were at a swinger’s club. The video clearly shows a woman dressed in black, stealing money. It’s uncanny.
“But she never actually stole it.”
But she never actually stole it. How does this happen?
Bill installs Nanny Cam, which is a camera hidden in something very small, in this case, on the urn of the mother’s father. It will stream for about three weeks, but some very interesting things happen within those three weeks.
Bill will go in dressed as the babysitter and steal everything. He will even manipulate the timestamps so that they coincide at the perfect intervals for when the babysitter was actually there. The babysitter is playing with LEGOS, but it shows her stealing jewelry and neglecting the children. She could be playing Jenga, but in the video, she’s raping that child’s college fund. She’ll go on Sally and get booed for being a thief, but then extends her 15 minutes of fame into 30 on the Maury Povich show as she passes the polygraph test with ease.
Bill makes his living this way. Through this method, every customer he has notices some theft. There aren’t any honest babysitters with Bill. There can’t be.
He is hired to watch the babysitter for $80 an hour. And steals over $5000 on average and then goes on television to talk about it for another $5000. At the end of the month, he has generated over $15,000 from only one client. It’s uncanny.
One night, Bill was going in to “create more business for himself,” and targeted an antique watch.
“Pre-World War I.”
However, two weeks prior, he told his customers that the babysitter had been stealing, so what his customers did was create a snare trap in the drawer to maximize the sting of defeat.
“I opened the drawer and...”
“Yeah?”
A snap is a sound that occurs which mirrors a duck’s quack. It’s hard to make that sound echo, which means that when Bill opened the drawer to reach for the watch, the sound couldn’t have been only a snap...but also at least a crack to accompany it.
“A snap. I could hear it echo.”
Bill’s finger snapped and cracked like a twig being bent and twisted apart. But, he couldn’t just leave his finger in the vice, so he had to pry it open and hold his ripped finger in his hand. He ran off like a man who had his finger torn apart in a vice would, but his escape plan did not include falling and dropping his finger into the neighbor’s garbage can.
“I had to go rummaging through their garbage at 1:30 in the morning. It was a feeling game.”
So he sifted through the neighbor’s trash and finally found his finger. He could even see and feel the blood still clinging to it. He tied a rubber band to the finger and his stump. Delighted, he drove to the hospital to have it reattached.
“Please please please! Do something about this,” he cried.
The doctors looked absolutely puzzled. And it wasn’t until Bill looked at his finger that he realized that it was a bloody tampon from his client’s neighbors.
And now he’s down one finger and up one yeasty tampon.
“I still needed to go clear that tape though. There was a video of me getting my finger snapped off. That won’t look good in court.”
So Bill quickly replaced the tape.
And now he’s down one video of his marriage, and up one video of his finger getting snapped off.
“My wife was curious about the tape when she went to show her friends the wedding video. She just started asking me a bunch of questions. ‘Bill, why were you looking through their drawers? Bill, why did your finger get snapped off in the drawer? Bill, why are you dressed like a woman? And who is that two year old kid in the doorway watching all of this?’ She fainted when she saw my amputated finger. She hit her head on the edge of the coffee table, and now here I am.”
So he hopes that this kid doesn’t remember a damn thing. He prays that this isn’t his first memory.
We call it a blank spot, and we all have one.
“Mr. Borden, your wife needs you now. It’s time.”
The man patiently waiting gets up and runs. His wife is giving birth today, and he’s going to be bringing a baby into a world with pus facials and tampon fingers.
Hours go by without a sound, but Mr. Borden comes back into the room in hysterics.
“It’s a boy.”
Everyone congratulates him.
“But there’s a problem.”
But there was a problem.
Contrary to what you’d see in Dora the Explorer, childbirth is a very messy process. Popping out a baby is the only act in the entire world where the creation of it looks exactly the same as if you smashed it with a sledgehammer. It’s a cleanup paradox.
Mr. Borden was in his green hospital scrubs to witness his child’s birth.
From the moment we’re born, we’re ranked. We’re put on charts. We’re in smoke filled rooms on paper as a demographic. We’re statistics.
And Mr. Borden belongs to the statistics of men who have passed out during their wives’ childbirth.
It’s not as uncommon of an occurrence as you’d think. Call up your hospital right now and ask...they will be unsurprisingly unsurprised.
And people like Mr. Borden are the reasons why.
As Mr. Borden watches Mrs. Borden going through her Lamaze breathing, he notices that childbirth is not like an episode of Dora the Explorer. It isn’t clean at all. In fact, it’s quite revolting. He notices that Mrs. Borden’s vagina seems to be rather wet with an unknown fluid. And he notices that Mrs. Borden’s vagina seems to be spread open a lot larger than normal. He is surprisingly surprised.
After that, he notices that his heart begins to race, and he notices that his vision is becoming more blurred as his head becomes lighter and lighter...like a raft in a pool deflating.
And then he wakes up and notices a mess like none other.
Mr. Borden fell about eight seconds before Mrs. Borden squeezed out her young one. Because of this, the focus of the nurses and doctor were shifted to Mr. Borden. As a result, a baby came in a rather unusual way.
By meeting gravity before his mother.
As Mr. Borden comes to, he is given the full story. As he faints, his child is being born. As his child is being born, the floor becomes covered with amniotic fluid. As this happens, nurses trying to help Mr. Borden begin to slip and slide. As he helps Mr. Borden, one of the nurses falls down and hits his head. This then, of course, results in another distraction from a baby being born and a mother screaming because her vagina is being torn apart, to helping a nurse who fell down because of a fainting man.
That whole notion that hospital floors are extremely clean is simply not true. I mean how can it be true if the floor is covered with blood and afterbirth?
Mr. Borden comes and explains this to us. His head has been stitched up from falling into the wall.
“She is going to need to do Olympic-style Kegel exercises to tighten that sucker up.”
Let’s hope this baby has no recollection of this event, because his first memory would be being born onto the floor of a hospital, and nobody needs that.
So I ask you:
Think back. Think long and think hard. Find your first memory. What do you remember?
My first memory is waiting in a hospital room for my twelve month checkup while three men discuss their ridiculous lives.
We call it a blank spot, and we all have one. Except me.
My blank spot has been filled in like a demented Bob Ross painting. Instead of a “happy little tree,” I have “happy little tampon fingers.” The thought of pus facials still haunt me.
So think back, and think long and think hard. What do you remember? What if you filled in that blank spot? How far back would it go, and if you got to that point, that moment...would it be worth knowing what it is? Because frustration comes from realizing it exists, but suffering comes from realizing what it is.
|
|
|
|
