“But,” whimpered Oz. “What if I have to pee?”
“You’ll just make sure not to drink water before bedtime,” said Oz’s mother.
“But what if I pee anyway?” cried Oz.
“Then you’ll be a bed-wetter,” said his mother. “And we’ll have to fix that, too.”
Never a truer word was spoken. Two weeks later, after multiple midnight accidents courtesy of Oz’s inability to touch the floor while wearing his magic shoes, his bed linens were exchanged for rubber sheets. His mother, deciding once more that her son needed help, had a serious conversation with Oz’s pediatrician, Doctor Pepper, another name that made Oz secretly smile, and was ultimately given a bottle of pills to make him tinkle only a little in the wee-wee hours of the morning.
So now, not only did Oz have to wear magic shoes while sleeping on rubber sheets, he was also medicated, and that medication made him listless, foggy, and fat.
Months later, after Oz had turned from a flat-footed pigeon with toes into a round, flat-footed pigeon with toes, his mother decided that nutrition might be the answer. Therefore, she brought him to a dietician named Mrs. Twig.
Really?
Mrs. Twig told Oz’s mother that her son was only going through a baby-fat stage and she needn’t worry.
So she didn’t.
By the time Oz was eleven years old, he was on his fifth pair of magic shoes, which did little good, and he tipped the scales at a whopping 217 pounds.
The excess weight was awful for such a little boy, and was compounded by Oz’s mother’s misguided love. Whenever Oz felt down about his feet, or his weight, or his incontinence, or his medication, his mother gave him a double helping of chocolate-marshmallow ice cream with extra jimmies, because ice cream wasn’t anything at all without jimmies.
That year, Oz’s dental appointment was anything but happy. His mother’s dentist-cousin, who had often praised Oz for how well he took care of his teeth, informed Mrs. Bean that Oz had not one, but four cavities, and was a likely candidate for braces.
“I don’t want to be a metal mouth,” Oz cried at dinner that night as he drowned his sorrows in a bowl filled with macaroni and cheese, while Grampa Moe nodded off because that’s what Grampa Moe now did.
“Braces will help you,” his mother told him, and demanded he clean his plate before he left the table.
Seven days and many meltdowns later, Oz was brought to his mother’s dentist-cousin, strapped to a chair, shot full of Novocain, drilled, metaled and given rubber bands.
By the time Oz was thirteen, it became obvious to Oz’s mother but absolutely no one else that Oz, heavy and dulled from medication, listed to one side when he waddled.
Once again, his mother vowed to help and brought him to a specialist in Boston to examine his spine. Oz dutifully went, a chocolate bar melting in his pocket the whole ride, and was told by the new doctor, whose name Oz no longer cared to know, that he had scoliosis, a fancy name that meant that his spine curved, and that he would need to wear a back brace to make his spine grow straight.
“It’s not so bad,” said his mother, as she knelt in front of him in the bathroom and washed out his inverted pocket that was caked with melted chocolate. “A brace will help you grow straight and tall. You’ll see.”
Two weeks later, after the new doctor was paid handsomely for his misdiagnosis, Oz was fitted into a brace that held his head erect, stretched his neck, and reached down his back almost to his tail bone. Unfortunately, all forms of physical activity were shuffled to one side because of the device, thereby causing Oz’s weight to mount even more.
One year later, when he hit an alarming growth spurt that many children go through, he developed excruciating pains in his legs. Dr. Pepper thought the pain might be caused by his weight, which now settled around 250 pounds, but Oz’s mother couldn’t be too sure.
Therefore, she shuffled her son off to Boston yet again, with braces on his teeth and back, medicated, morbidly obese, and pigeon toed. Once there, he was diagnosed with growing pains, or as the medical community called it, Osgood-Schlatter disease.
The common, rehabilitative course of action for such a condition was stretching; however, since Oz couldn’t bend to touch his pigeon toes as a result of his weight and his back brace, he was injected in his knees with all manner of analgesics, braced on his legs, and propped in a corner so that he could properly heal.
That was a dark time in Ozzie Bean’s young life. School was nearly impossible to manage. Most classrooms had to make room for the enormous adolescent behind all the desks, where he stood, almost immobile, from all manner of medical contraptions.
Being so far away from the black board was hard for him, as the words his teachers wrote out with chalk were so small they were nearly impossible to read.
Hence, his mother decided visual help was needed. She took him to see Doctor Smiley, the local optometrist, who should have arguably been a dentist instead of an eye doctor, and had him fitted with huge goggle-glasses that made him look like his Auntie Ellen, who used to own a pig farm.
Unfortunately, Oz’s glasses didn’t help his grades. By then, he passed most of his time daydreaming about a better world where he wasn’t so medically unfit. In short order, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder by a woefully unqualified student teacher.
His mother agreed and once again demanded medical intervention for her son in the form of a little pill called Ritalin.
Ritalin was supposed to help with his concentration.
Boy did it ever.
Within weeks, Oz became as quick as a whip and as sharp as a tack. Obviously, he didn’t need the Ritalin to begin with, but now that he had it, his brain sped at a rate approaching genius. His grades skyrocketed and his mental acuity became crystal clear. Furthermore, as a welcomed but unanticipated side effect of his new wonder drug, Oz’s appetite disappeared and the weight literally melted off of him.
By his fourteenth birthday, Oz was no longer tipping the scales at 250 pounds. He was a lean 174. During his weight loss, Oz was able to bend, and stretch, and work through the pain of his Osgood-Schlatter disease, so much so that his legs grew sturdy and strong. They grew so strong, in fact, that his misdiagnosed pigeon-toed stance which started his medical woes corrected itself and his feet pointed straight.
The magic shoes were discarded, and so were the rubber, pee-filled sheets that he had lived with for so long, as well as the accursed wee-wee medication.
A few months more and Oz’s mother’s dentist-cousin removed the metal from his mouth after years of squint-worthy braces, and revealed a stunning smile of perfect teeth underneath.
Doctor Smiley traded in Oz’s goggle-glasses for contacts, and finally, after years of torture, the well-paid specialist in Boston reluctantly removed his back brace to reveal a perfect spine that was so perfect, Oz was photographed from the front and side and featured in a medical journal that sang false praises of his specialist.
By then, Grampa Moe had been planted in the ground, and it was only Oz and his mother left in the house. Mrs. Bean, who had devoted years and years of medical malpractice to her son, was all but lost. There was nothing left she could do to him.
Therefore, Mrs. Bean turned to drink. At first, it was only wine with dinner. Then her habit evolved to include classy Martinis at lunch and Bloody Marys with breakfast.
After dinner, she often mixed Kahlua in her coffee and topped off the evening with a blue-collar beer or six.
In short order, Mrs. Bean became a raging alcoholic with a liver that was so saturated with gin and the like that her skin began to turn sallow.
Oz was sixteen then. He was the youngest captain of the varsity football team in his high school’s history. He was on the student council, near the top of his class, and dating a blond cheerleader who made most boys carry their books low over their crotches when she sauntered by during passing time at school.
One day after football practice and a quickie with the blond underneath the b
leachers, a tall, muscled, exceptionally handsome young man named Ozzie Bean let himself into his house. He fully expected to find his mother sloshing around in a tumbler of vodka, but instead discovered her at the foot of the stairs, broken and drunk, slurring about how she fell down the entire flight.
“I need help,” she cried. “Call a doctor, any doctor, or an ambulance.” It was clear to Oz she wasn’t hurt all that critically, but his mother was insistent that all manner of specialists come rushing to her aid or she’d likely die.
Oz stared at his mother for a long, long moment as she screamed at him to pick up the phone. The air around her reeked of liquor and the stench from her yellowing skin made his nose wrinkle.
Finally, he decided that his mother, who had medically tortured him his entire life because he was a flat-footed pigeon with toes, with urinary tract issues, bad teeth, a curved spine, Osgood-Schlatter disease, attention deficit disorder, and impaired vision, did, in fact, need help.
He walked into the den, the one that Grampa Moe used to sit in with his flat and flapping feet, took a plump pillow filled with goose down from the couch, and returned to his drunken mother at the foot of the stairs.
Then he helped her, pushing the pillow into her face while she ranted, and screamed, and wailed, and gasped, until she finally stopped moving altogether.
He helped her but good.
P is for Pam
Who’s A Wiz With Cosmetics
RUBIN AND PAM huddled beneath the underpass near the railroad tracks. They shivered like tiny Chihuahuas even though the cold barely touched them.
They had become very good actors.
October was proving to be a good deal harsher than either of them had expected, and now that Springfield was in the throes of another police crackdown, hiding in plain sight was both a stroke of genius and a dangerous game.
There were others there, underneath the underpass. Most circled around fires blooming out of rusted barrels, their arms extended to grab hold of the warmth. The smallest of them wore double and triple layers and tried to get close to the flames, but more often than not, they were rudely pushed away.
Pam watched a small girl, probably ten or eleven, try and fail numerous times to embrace some heat. She was as thin and desperate as any number of stray dogs that congregated by the trash bins in the alley behind Restaurant Row. Somehow, she even managed to have that beady-eyed hungry look.
Pam understood hunger all too well.
“We need food,” she whispered to Rubin, momentarily forgetting about the waif.
“Ya think?” he muttered. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
She grinned and moved as close to Rubin as possible, putting her mouth right up against his ear. “I love you,” she whispered, and quickly licked his ear lobe—a forked tongue kiss of a deadly adder.
Rubin’s tense body relaxed just one notch. “I said tell me something I don’t know.”
Pam heard laughter and looked up. The little girl was circling yet another barrel and another flame. This time, three older boys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, who had claimed the barrel for themselves, matched her hungry gaze with their own. Pam’s mouth curved downward. She wondered how long it would be before that little girl, with her rat’s nest hair and angelic face, compromised the last bits of herself to live another day.
Above them, cars rumbled along 91 heading up toward Vermont or down to Hartford. Springfield was the worst possible place for the two of them right now. The crackdown was in full swing. They were stuck and afraid.
Mostly they were hungry.
“Can we at least find a bathroom?” Pam said, pulling away from Rubin and standing up. She was wearing a leather coat that she had taken from that girl on Lyman Street, the one they found camping out on the third floor of one of the burnt out buildings there. The burgundy folds didn’t quite fit Pam and the leather was a little loose, but she didn’t care.
Pam liked the way the coat made her feel normal.
“Why?” Rubin grumbled. “It’s not like either of us have to take a leak.”
“You need more cover up,” she told him. “So do I.”
Rubin waved his hand and stared into the darkness. “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I hate wearing that crap.”
Pam crossed her arms over her chest. “Then care for me,” she said, even though she knew her words might not be enough.
Since Mickey Todd’s party at the end of July, time had devolved into a muddy pool of moments, each one somehow more hideous than the last. That party was when Pam had talked Rubin into trying some of the new stuff that Mickey said came from New York City. The little squares of paper infused with poison were supposed to be totally mind-blowing, and Pam had been craving an awesome high.
Her awesome high ended up being a bummer low.
They both died that night.
When they woke up early the next morning, neither Pam nor Rubin knew they had stepped through an invisible door to the dark side. They disentangled themselves from the sweaty mess of arms and legs, needles and bongs, that was a regular occurrence in Mickey’s parents’ basement, and snuck back home to their foster mother’s house.
They crawled through Rubin’s bedroom window and into their own beds like they had done dozens of times before.
It wasn’t until later that day, when they both first began to understand that something was terribly wrong and the stories started flooding the news, that they pieced two and two together.
Zombies, the reports said. Dead men walking.
Pam remembered Rubin’s flip-out. “It was Mickey’s shit,” he cried as he stared at his pallid complexion in the mirror, replete with blue lips and gray eyes. “He freaking murdered me.”
“Us,” Pam snapped back as the truth of their situation started to sink in. “He murdered us.”
Hours more, after the hunger began clawing at their insides, they killed their foster mother, Mrs. Monroe, for food.
Pam had only been with her for six months and Rubin for not much longer. The fact that they were short-timers under Mrs. Monroe’s roof made it a little easier to claim her as a victim. After all, they didn’t know her all that well to begin with. Besides, both fostering and mothering were as foreign to Mrs. Monroe as walking. She bumbled around their tiny house on Locust Street in her disability cart, barking orders to Rubin and Pam, and demanding that they dash out to the Lil’ Peach at all hours to buy her cigarettes or Devil Dogs with her vouchers.
Somehow, her less-than-stellar mothering made it easier for Pam to hack off her foot with a butcher knife and Rubin to bite out her tongue and suck on the sweetness it promised.
The two of them lasted almost a week off of Mrs. Monroe. Thank goodness there was a freezer in the basement or the meat would have gone bad in the summer heat. Still, after a very short amount of time, Mrs. Monroe started to taste funny, then off, and finally rank, until the two of them realized that the dead couldn’t eat the dead.
They had to find someone new—someone alive. Thankfully they didn’t have to look far.
While the city was in a panic because of others like them, all Rubin and Pam had to do was knock on Mrs. O’Malley’s door two houses down.
They were smarter with Mrs. O.
Rubin was the one who thought of using duct tape to cover her mouth, bind her arms, and secure her legs. With no place for the old woman to run, even though her running days had long since passed, they were able to keep her alive for the better part of three days while they parceled out the best pieces of her.
She didn’t die until they finally went for her innards, and that was only after they had finished with her lower legs, her ears, her nose, and all of her fingers. Rubin was the one who couldn’t stand waiting anymore. He tore into her soft belly.
Pam, on the other hand, opened up Mrs. O’Malley’s head and scooped out her brains. That night, while they knocked back squiggly worms of thought that once belonged to the old lady, they realized that if they used cover-up, lipstick and a few
other items that the Mrs. O had on her makeup table, they just might be able to go out at night without causing the food to freak out.
The makeup idea worked perfectly.
As long as they stuck to the shadows, no one really noticed what they were, and as long as they kept eating, most of their decay could be kept at bay. Of course, they had to cover their smell with perfume and cologne, and Rubin had to get with the program about wearing makeup, but that was the least of their worries.
The city had begun hunting the dead with a vengeance and all they could do was watch in silence as their corpse brothers and sisters were decapitated and burned.
Several dozen victims and three months later, they found themselves with the homeless street kids beneath the underpass near the railroad tracks. Most of them looked so awful in life that Rubin and Pam fit right in, even though the two of them were being held together with Maybelline and Avon.
“Hey,” a boy whispered to Pam as she was trying to pull Rubin out of his post-mortem pity party, find a bathroom, and maybe someone to eat. The boy had been standing in the shadows, only feet away from them and neither she nor Rubin had noticed.
Rubin immediately scrambled to his feet and pushed Pam behind him. “What?” he barked, almost a little too loudly and the closest cluster of barrel huggers absentmindedly took notice. “Get lost.”
The boy didn’t move. He was wearing a gray hoodie, jeans and dirty sneakers. He stood up against one of the cement pilings, hidden in a slice of dark that all but swallowed him in obscurity.
“I was . . . I’m a little hungry,” the boy said. “I was hoping you could, you know, help me out?”
Rubin took a step forward and curled his lip. “What the hell do you think we look like, the Red Cross?”
Pam put her hand on Rubin’s arm, hoping he would dial it down a notch so they would remain unnoticed. Besides, she didn’t have to peer into the shadows and see the boy’s face to understand what he was asking. Although her nostrils were drying and the mucous membranes inside we’re starting to become useless, she could still smell the boy.
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