by Thom Jones
He started down the stairway and was dealt a concussive blow on the back of his head. He got the full star show as he tumbled down the stairs. Soon the blue-steel barrel of a .44 was working over his head, while his body was being kicked by a total of six combat boots. Then everything went blank.
When he came to, Clifford found himself bound in a chair in a dark room. His mouth was covered with duct tape. A tall man wearing a ski mask pointed a Mini Maglite in his face. “I want the money, the guns, and the good,” the tall man said. “Where is it?” He ripped the tape from Clifford’s mouth.
“I got the guns and most of the dope, but I spent the money.”
“Wrong answer. I want to hear the right answer.”
“I told you, I blew the money.”
Two sharp blows to the face. Clifford swallowed a tooth with a mouthful of hot salty blood.
“I don’t want to hear that fucking shit. I want the good, brother. The good.”
“There’s a way,” he said. “I know a way.”
“You find the way, you give us the good, and you can go back to your strange little life.”
He was led outside and pushed into the back of a gray Mercedes. They drove him to his apartment and collected the dope and guns. Next stop was his mother’s house. The old woman, fresh from chemotherapy treatment, got the bad news. She sat next to her son in the back of the Mercedes as they drove to the bank. She took out a second mortgage on her house, converted it to cash, and handed the tall man $19,000.
Driven to the driveway of her twice-mortgaged home, Mrs. Grimes staggered into the house, locked the door, and wet her pants on the hardwood floor.
Meanwhile, the thugs dropped Clifford in the hospital parking lot. Two days there and he was shipped to detox. From there it was in-house rehab. He had full medical, so the stay cost him only seventy dollars, which he had to borrow from his mother. He had more than exhausted his sick leave, but given the nature of his situation, other tenders contributed to a sick-leave pool on his behalf. He lay in his mother’s house watching Oprah, drag-assing between the couch and refrigerator until the end of June, a full three months.
In July he returned to his post on Cermak, though he could hardly stand. In between button pushings he rested on the floor. The wax was fragrant still. One nice thing, he had done a good job on the floor. He felt as if he would die. Day after day it was the same routine. By midsummer he was feeling a little better, though he was unable to reestablish contact with the higher power. It was a bleak and godless universe.
In early August, Cotton had a hernia operation, and Clifford filled in for him. He wasn’t used to bright sunshine and the heat of summer. He sat in the bridge house with his binoculars. There had been three jumpers that month, there was a full moon, and he was told to be on the lookout for anyone gathering his nerve. The advice was ironic, since Clifford wanted to jump himself.
The river smelled of rotten carp. Clifford needed to hit the floor again, but a barge was coming downriver. He could lie down and get up in five minutes, but that would entail doing a sit-up to right himself. So he stood waiting on frail, toothpick legs. Since he quit the juice, and since he had been away from the gym, he’d lost so much muscle mass that he was just a gray bag of skin. He pushed the button, and as the cement barge chugged through the oily waters, Clifford spotted three dead dogs in its wake, bloated like sausage boiled to the point of bursting. They were medium-size dogs, one black, another gray, and the third—whew, the third!—a rotten blob of golden fur without shape or form. In the dogs Clifford saw dimensions of death no mortal was meant to see.
Meanwhile, horns blared on Cermak, punctuated by psychotic screams of murder. The sun shimmering off the chrome bumpers and trim was blinding. Drivers stepped out of their vehicles and shook their fists at Clifford, who stood at his post in the watchtower feeling nine inches tall. The air was saturated with misery; the room spun, the dying carp gasped. Clifford pushed the red button.
Diary of My Health
APRIL 2. HOMER, my UPS guy, drops off three cartons of Medco pharmaceuticals. Homer is an okay guy if you steer him clear of religion and all talk of hell, but I slipped up today and got him going. “Hell?” he says. “You’re looking at bad shit before your feet hit the ground, before you even get there. Man, they got these close-quarter holding cells at the farthest edge of the earth, little concrete anterooms where they soften up the condemned before transit. Bones are crushed. Sinners are pounded, gassed, drawn, quartered, lashed up and down. Then you’re deloused with carbolic acid, and all the while they play Grateful Dead albums. Have you ever really listened to a Grateful Dead album? Actually listened? It’s only the beginning! Charon, a terrifying monster in his own right, proceeds to ferry the doomed across the river Styx. Weeping and wailing like a pack of howling wolves. Begging forgiveness, gnashing teeth. Are you with me?” he says with a celestial fire in his eyes. “I don’t think so, Thomas. I don’t think you’re paying close attention, but you should because it gets much worse. Up here hedonists like yourself frolic and sin as they have for centuries, pushovers for Satan and his lies! Hell is no cartoon; it’s a real place. Cross the river, baby, and you got H-E-double-hockey-sticks for all of time. Abandon hope all ye who enter! First thing, they roast you on a spit while Satan reads you the rules and regulations. He’s a fast talker with that split tongue, but still, it takes nine days to complete the job, and all this time you’re roasting on a skewer. Once the grave implications of your situation sink in demons cool you off with liquid nitrogen and send you out to mop and wax a football field, side by side with the likes of Joseph Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. When that’s done, thirty centuries later, you get five minutes to write a sixty-page term paper with a pencil nub or a melting beige Crayola crayon before some other hideous torment.” Along with my pharmaceutical boxes, Homer picks up a smaller package from his hand truck. He looks at it and shakes his head in dismay. “Thomas, you are still getting packages from Playboy magazine. Why do I stand here wasting my breath?” Homer glances at his watch. Thank God he’s running behind. He hops back in his brown truck and peels rubber out of my driveway. I carry three boxes of drugs to my little pharmacy just off the kitchen and begin to restock the shelves. Okay, what have we got here?
Box one: a. Lamictal, Neurontin, and Klonopin for epilepsy. (I hit my head on a rock the first time I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.) b. Elavil, Prozac, Mellaril, Tegretol, and lithium for bipolar disorder. (Take lithium for a while and you’re a Haitian zombie, no Niagara Falls pioneer.)
Box two: a. Six bottles of Humalog insulin in bubble-wrapped cool packs. I store those in the fridge. b. Blood-sugar strips. A brittle diabetic, I have to test fifteen times a day at eighty cents a strip. c. Glucose tablets for hypoglycemia. d. Glucometer batteries. e. Lancets, alcohol swabs, insulin reservoirs, and soft-set infusion kits.
Box three: a. Lipitor, cholesterol. b. Atacand, blood pressure. c. Nitroglycerin cream for cyanotic toes. d. Provigil for narcolepsy. e. Crap for my sleep apnea ventilator (two blow-dryers up the nostrils work just as well).
April 6. I read the Bible today. I don’t know where Homer comes up with this shit. The only part of the hell scenario I can confirm is the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus. I already gnash my teeth. That’s why I wear a plastic tooth guard at night.
April 7. Is it just me, or am I correct in thinking that the only time people have any semblance of fun is when they’re on dope or hard liquor? I was a little kid the last time I had natural fun. Aurora, Illinois, July 25, 1954. The top of the ninth. White Sox versus Boston, the first game of a doubleheader, a partly cloudy, cool day, 26,068 fans. Jack Harshman on the hill mowing them down. Now with an 0-and-2 count, he shakes off the catcher. I am across the street at Pike’s Dairy, throwing waterlogged baseballs, three pounds each, against a rusty milk truck when my mother calls me in to put on my pair of wool pants and go to church. I am thence sucked into a vortex of darkest gloom from which I’ve never been released.
> April 14. Los Angeles. A table reading of my fifth film script. Not a good time for a Crohn’s disease flare-up. I tough it out with butt cheeks so tight that coal could be squeezed into diamonds. The reading goes badly. In a CAA men’s room, butt cheeks give way to Hershey-squirt diarrhea. Back in my hotel room, more of the same. On the three-hour plane ride home, a botched attempt at sneaking a fart leads to an episode of explosive diarrhea. I disembark (without underwear) and, in the safety of home, endure the usual agony while I wait for the Lomotil to kick in. I failed to stuff the medication into my portable pharmacy. It was the grave omission of a shock-treatment memory-loss fool. On top of everything else, the script gets shelved.
April 16. I’ve been out of sorts lately, flat-out depressed. That’s why I decided to pick up my health journal again and record my last days. Sometimes I want to eat a quarter pound of barbiturates and various supplementary poisons, chased with absinthe, and then relax to Rammstein in the closed garage with my Citroën 2CV full throttle.
April 21. Does an ant have a soul? Do good ants upgrade into a higher life-form? A lobster, say? Endless reincarnations suck. Every female I have ever met tells me she used to be Cleopatra. I was a yak tender of no distinction living on the steppes of Mongolia, where there was nothing to eat except clay.
April 25. Most Americans don’t know it, but noise is a leading cause of strokes and heart attacks. People get used to noise, but it kills them all the same. A person in an inner city can sleep only to the lullaby of sirens and gunfire. At five in the morning I hear fucking birds chirping, crows cawing, while a woodpecker tattoos the aluminum rain gutter just outside my bedroom. My Dutch neighbor Elsa says somebody has been vomiting outside her window at five in the morning. It’s probably her neighbor, who used to attend two AA meetings a day. “Why would someone vomit outside?” she asks me. “It makes a mess. You could just puke in the toilet and flush it.” Elsa says she was about to go outside to investigate but saw a large wolf looking at her through her sliding glass door. “Thom, he just wouldn’t quit staring at me.”
April 29. The UPS guy knows I don’t exactly work, so he asks if I can drop by in the morning to help move his wife’s grand piano up to the third floor. “While we’re in the attic, I’d like to move my anvil collection from upstairs down to the basement. If there’s time, I want to knock down a chimney. Bring a respirator.” If I piss Homer off, he’ll throw my pharmaceutical shipments off a bridge into the river. The fish will begin doing odd things. They could grow feet and walk around town like thugs. Who knows?
April 30. Goddamn it. My fucking back is killing me, and I squashed my thumb trying to haul two anvils at once. No “under the spreading chestnut tree,” just a busted thumb.
May 4. Killer back pain.
June 6. Oh, for Christ’s sake, not only is my back still killing me, I’ve got a whopping summer cold!
June 7. Raw throat, fever, and nasal congestion. A seven on the Thom Jones Misery Index.
June 8. Cold worse. I have to lay all day.
June 10. Canker sore on right tongue edge. My tongue looks like elephant leather.
June 11. Now a cough. I knew this would happen.
June 12. Took five hundred mikes of mescaline and am examining the crevice in my tongue when it suddenly turns into a Komodo dragon and chases me out into the yard. I come down at midnight and can’t find my tongue. Dope paranoia forces me to hide under the bed, where I discover a box turtle with halitosis. I come down a little and carefully creep downstairs, secure all door and window locks, double-check same, and then watch a Pee-wee Herman flick on HBO, all the while standing on the balls of my feet, filled with terror and great apprehension.
June 13. Find tongue under the Citroën. Superglue it back on.
June 14. After stocking the shelves of my pharmacy I make for the health food store to pick up a few bottles of vitamins and snake oil remedies:
a. Vitamins: complete 50-milligram Bs, vitamin C, folic acid, dissolve-under-tongue B12, pantothenic acid, vitamin E (natural mixed tocopherols), biotin, and vitamin D. b. Minerals: selenium, calcium citrate, magnesium, biocitric copper, chromium, and Kreb’s “Transported by the Fuel of Life” zinc. c. Antioxidants: alpha lipoic acid, lutein, lycopene, grape seed oil, pine bark extract, Q10, Essential Greens 3000, curcumin, etc. d. Herbs: saw palmetto, hoodia, pau d’arco (I can’t remember what it’s for), hawthorn berry. e. Amazon River tropical frog skin.
Have I already mentioned that my memory is shot? I don’t remember.
June 15. As a kid I experienced instances of natural fun whenever the Gypsies came to town. My grandmother saved the burlap bags potatoes came in and each year gave them to the Gypsies, who in turn sharpened all her butcher knives and fixed a coffeepot with a broken handle. What a life! Roving caravans, dancing around a campfire to accordion and violin music. Crystal-ball visions of the future. One of the Gypsy elders took a shine to me and invited me to join up.
“Join up? Tonight? Let me think about it. I’m only five years old.”
“Yes. Escape the ball and chain and come with us. It’s a slacker lifestyle. The women do all the work.”
I didn’t go. I should have. Every time I think of it I kick myself in the ass.
My grandmother paid the fortune-teller fifty cents to tell her where she misplaced a cigar box filled with cash. The fortune-teller hit the nail on the head. It was a two-for-one deal. While my grandmother retrieved the cigar box, the Gypsy told me I would be jailed four times, fired from a number of jobs, mental hospitals, ambulances called, squad cars, and ultimately twenty-two years as a custodian. Boy, did she ever hit the nail on the head.
June 16. Cough much worse. Kaff, kaff, kaff, damn! It’s not the cough of acute bronchitis, which I have experienced seven times. It’s a dry cough, which rules out pneumonia and cystic fibrosis. It’s not lung cancer, with its telltale wheeze, lobar atelectasis with mediastinal shift, diminished expansion, dullness of percussion, and loss of breath with pain and loss of weight. It could be Hand-Schüller-Christian disease. You will have a dry cough when you get that.
June 17. Dizzy. Head spinning, eyes whirling like pinwheels, smoke coming out of my ears. It feels like getting off the carnival Rock-O-Plane after a corn dog, a jumbo birch beer, and a haystack of pink cotton candy.
June 18. Woke up okay. Blood pressure 115/64. Pulse 57. Blood sugar 89. The fever is down, but the cough dogs me. What if it is lung cancer? Fuck. Had to lie on floor and breathe into a brown paper bag.
June 20. Eat a bowl of alfalfa to bolster my waning immune system. Man, I’ll never do that again. Decide to just fuck everything and ingest a large dose of ketamine. Paralyzed, I lie on the floor and watch my soul leave my body and fly to remote galaxies in outer space. Get real scared and try to reel my soul in. A bad scene ensues. I am chased by a fleet of spaceships from the planet Mongo. Captain Torch at the wheel of the lead rocket ship. (Man, he hasn’t aged well.) He shakes his fist at me, and I flip him the bird. Then I turn invisible, which is really draining. I bump into the Hubble Space Telescope and bruise my hip smashing the auxiliary lens into a thousand pieces.
June 22. I wake up with three ### floaters in my eye. When the nurse hands the phone to my ophthalmologist I overhear him saying, “What’s wrong with poor Thom today?” I say I think little elves are in my eye typing on the back of my retina with an old portable Smith Corona typewriter. “Like with a faded ribbon,” I tell him. When I explain this to him over the phone, this is what he says: “Look, Mr. Jones. You call me drunk at two in the morning. You call in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. How many times have I found you sitting on the curb in front of my office as I drive in to work? Before I put the car into park you’re banging on my window with some new bullshit symptom. I don’t want to be your doctor anymore. Don’t even come close to my office. I’m filing a restraining order against you, and I’m having my phone number changed.”
June 28. I just noticed how yellow my teeth are getting. I brush them with Comet for a gle
aming white smile.
June 29. Gums hurt. Scurvy? I eat four lemons and get a sour stomach. I take a Tagamet, Nexium, and drink an entire $2.95 bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
July 1. Constipated. Respite from diarrhea caused by Crohn’s disease, finally.
July 5. Insomnia.
July 6. Insomnia. Completely hagged out.
July 7. I just can’t sleep. Lie in bed and worry.
July 8. Toss, turn, and mash pillows all night. Insomnia.
July 9. Will it never end? “The healthy man,” writes E. M. Cioran, “only dabbles in insomnia: He knows nothing of those who would give a kingdom for an hour of unconscious sleep, those as terrified by the sight of a bed as they would be of a torture rack.”
July 12. Twelve nights and not even a wink.
July 14. Haggard beyond belief. There is a variant of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) that induces fatal insomnia. Dead in four to twelve months! Boy, I’ve eaten my share of burgers.
July 19. What if I were to fly to Africa, to a heavily infected tsetse fly zone, and contract sleeping sickness to counterbalance my affliction? Book a flight to Africa.
July 26. Try to read Ulysses and fall into a five-day coma. Why didn’t I think of that in the first place? I feel great!
July 27. Depressed again. Antidepressants should be called what they really are: hammers of despair. You can’t sleep, you can’t fuck, and your head feels like it contains seventeen pounds of aluminum.
Labor Day. Tossing a football with my brother, I jump to catch a high pass and feel a lightning bolt shoot through my arm. Shoulder hurts so bad I can only tightly squeeze my elbow to my rib cage. Can’t put on a shirt by myself.
September 5. Frozen shoulders are so rare, most people seldom hear of them. Twenty percent of the diabetic population gets them. A frozen shoulder is no day at the beach.
September 6. Insomnia again. The same old routine.