Kiss Me, I'm Undead

by Tasha L Driver

“By ‘goodies’ I hope you mean dead animal flesh. And I’d love some, but it won’t stay well on the bus or for however long they have me in the clinic waiting room.”

  “Let me know what the doc says. Oh, and just so you know, dead or undead, you’ll always have my heart.”

  Free Clinics Smell Like Pain and Misery.

  There were so many smells on that bus. Not a single one was good. A baby and an old guy both needed diaper changes. A bunch of kids reeked of the skunkiest weed possible. The lady in front of me wore Love’s Baby Soft. Did they seriously still make that shit? And I was certain the driver had had a Maxwell Street Polish for lunch. The smell of grilled onions and sausage burps kept wafting right at me. I couldn’t wait to get off this thing. Of course, the minute it dropped me off in front of the clinic and I stepped one foot inside, I knew the bus had to have been what heaven smelled like. This was clearly hell.

  Cleaner that smelled like a mixture between aspirin, Purell, and cherries permeated the air, but it did nothing to cover the stench of rot. At first, I was confused. I mean, this wasn’t a back alley full of dead rodents. But by the time it was almost my turn at the reception desk, I’d figured it out. It was the people. They were all rotting. Sick, at least, with illnesses that should be easy enough to get over...with the right care. But the people here had been suffering for a long time, probably unable to pay even the lowest amount on the clinic’s sliding scale fee. Therefore, they suffered until they could suffer no more.

  Someone once told me that only drug seekers went to the clinics. Looking around, I very much doubted that was true. I’d seen addicts in L.A. There were no tell-tale signs. No uncontrollable scratching. No wide eyes darting in every direction for the invisible person out to get them. No. These poor people were just...sick.

  “Next!”

  A woman, with an impeccable braided updo and hot pink eyeshadow that should have looked clownish but was pulled off well by her, stared at me from behind a counter, bare of everything except a basket of cheap condoms and pamphlets about a woman’s choice. Based on her colorful styling, I’d expected a ray of fucking sunshine, but the look she was giving me told me that she was not even close to it.

  “Um...I’m here to see a doctor about some problems I’ve been having—”

  “Are you bleeding profusely from any part of your body?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Been out of the country in the last 30 days or around another person who has?”

  “No. Uh...I mean yes.”

  “Which one, miss?”

  “My neighbor’s grandson is here from Germany.”

  She made a slight indecipherable noise. “Have you had bodily contact with him?”

  I thought of last night. “Well, yeah,” I squeaked, embarrassed for some reason.

  She reached out. “Hand me your ID.” I did. “Fill out these papers. Here’s a yellow card. You’ll be called after we get through all the reds but before any of the greens. It still may take a few hours.”

  Damn. I guess I didn’t have much of a choice. I took the clipboard with the stack of papers and found an empty seat next to an elderly woman knitting a hat. I peeked at the card on her lap. “Oh, you’re a red.”

  “Yeah. Insulin prices done gone up again. I haven’t had any in about three months.”

  “Oh, fuck me, Jesus.” I quickly covered my mouth and apologized for the curse. She wore a huge silver cross around her neck.

  “Don’t you worry. Jesus ain’t got nothing to do with them devils running the pharmaceutical companies. Now, this kidney failure? That’s all them.”

  I gasped. “Oh no! Shouldn’t you be at the ER or admitted to the hospital?”

  She shook her head and tsked me. “If I had the audacity to go there, I’d be dead. They don’t do a damn thing for old Black folks on Medicare but give us drugs to keep us quiet until we pass on.” She looked at me as if she’d just realized I wasn’t one of the Black folks. “Sorry, child. But if you don’t know now, it’s time for you to get ‘woke’ like all the teeny boppers be sayin’ these days. Now, what is a pretty princess like you doing here?”

  “I’m definitely no princess.” I chuckled without humor. “A waitress actually. I love my boss Gina, but she can’t give us insurance.”

  The woman dropped her knitting momentarily. “You work for Regina Madera! Now that’s a true woman, right there. We went to high school together many moons ago.” She looked ages older than Gina, but I guessed that was diabetes and whatever else taking a toll on her.

  I couldn’t gather the courage to bring up the shooting. Instead, I changed subjects with her hobby. “How do you do that so well?”

  “This knitting? Oh girl, I learned so I’d have an excuse to get away from my husband for a few hours. Some ladies at Third Baptist started a little club. We’d knit clothes and blankets for the babies all the young girls in the congregation were having, and all the while we’d gossip about who the daddies was and wasn’t.” She rocked back and forth laughing merrily. “Ooh, child. We was some awful old biddies. Um, uh, un.” Her fingers continued to create the intricate loops and patterns even as she got quieter, and it seemed she went somewhere else. “As the years kept passing, so many of us biddies kept dying. Diabetes. Cancer. Pneumonia. You name it. After a while, it didn’t make sense to keep meeting up. Plus, my Charles was long gone, and I had no reason to avoid him anymore. But I kept doing the knitting. All day, every day. If I don’t, my eyes will go, and the arthur-itis will take my hands. Hell, most days the knitting keeps me from passing out when my sugar gets so high I can’t think straight.”

  I had no clue what to say. I was mad at the whole world for her but saying it out loud somehow seemed both obvious and oblivious at the same time. So, I just patted her shoulder and started on my paperwork, answering meaningless questions about my last period, whether or not I smoked, and who my last partner was. As if any of that mattered when a sweet woman who’d lost everyone was going to die because some corporate fuckface wanted to profit off of her lifesaving medicine.

  After the knitting biddy with kidney failure had been called, and two more red cards that had sat near me but weren’t nearly as sweet did the same, I looked at my phone. Four hours and thirty-nine minutes had passed. I was starting to think that I was going to rot away in that waiting room when a door opened behind me, and I heard, “Kayla Smith!” called out. It took a few minutes to register that she was calling me, I’d had so many names in the past year. When it finally did, I jumped up like I’d won the lottery, or been invited onstage for a male strip show.

  “Me! That’s me. I’m here,” I rambled, shuffle-jogging to the woman like I’d lose my place if I didn’t get there quick enough. She held the door and motioned me into the inner sanctum where the rotting smell had been covered over many times by a high-powered antiseptic that smelled like the crushed aspirin and Purell but lacked the finesse of the cherries.

  The woman, wearing a set of scrubs with kittens on them along with two small afro-puffs in her hair and extreme cat-eye liner that flicked even higher than her thinly drawn brows, instructed me to go into room four. I did as she said and ended up in a room that was more bare than any medical exam room I’d ever been in. I knew it’d been a while—I was about fourteen the last time—but I remember anatomically-correct diagrams on the walls, countless jars full of cotton balls and swabs, and stacks of pamphlets about signs of various ailments. In this room, there was a small bed covered with worn beige vinyl and a thin sheet of paper that I assumed (hoped!) they changed between patients. It had stirrups that you could pull out from under it, and I really prayed that this wouldn’t be that type of visit. I hadn’t bothered to clean up my bikini line this morning. Why we women cared about that during a gyne exam, I didn’t know, but it was important.

  The assistant, whom I was going to dub “Cat Woman,” told me to sit on the bed, and she grabbed a few medical instrumen
ts out of a drawer. “I’m going to take your temperature first.”

  “Okay,” I said. Sounded pretty standard and legit. She put a black funnelly looking thing on the thermometer and stuck it in my ear.

  It beeped quickly. “Goddammit, this stupid shit. Always broke.” She slammed it down on the counter. Well, if it wasn’t already broken... “I’ll be back.”

  She left the exam room, and I heard her go into another. “Girl, I need the thermometer from in here.”

  Another voice, deeper but sassy, said, “I’m using it now, and I got seven more patients to get vitals on.”

  Cat Woman wasn’t happy at all. “That other one is broke. All I got to do is get this crazy-looking White girl started, and I can go for the day.”

  “How crazy-looking?” was his response. Did she realize she left the door open?

  “She’s got black hair with, get this, a big ‘ol white streak in it. It’s all teased up like she ready for a hair show. She’s pale as fuck, and she’s wearing a black top with skulls on it and some black capris. She looks like one of them crazy goth folks got stuck in the fifties.” Fucking bitch. I thought I looked cute. My self-esteem usually didn’t give two shits what other people said about my appearance, but it stung today for some reason. Maybe because I wasn’t feeling well to begin with.

  The male nurse sounded almost giddy. “You ain’t getting my thermometer, but I want to get a good look at this chick. Maybe sneak a pic to post on Twitter.” I could hear them both coming in my room at the same time that a voice said, “What about me?”

  “I’ll be right back, Mr. Johnson,” called a light-skinned man in rose-colored scrubs. He had a faded haircut that was capped off with perfect curls and wore highlighter on his cheekbones that I was dying to know the brand of. I’d be admiring his beauty even more if I wasn’t on the lookout for a cell phone that he might be trying to sneak a pic of me with. “Hi Miss...”

  “...Smith,” Cat Woman finished for him.

  His smile was too sugary. I wanted to call him “Sweetness,” but even my inner voice hated the thought of sounding too homophobic. “Well, Denita here has a problem with her equipment. You know how it goes. We’re going to try mine and see if it works better for you.”

  I laughed. It was a lot harder than I wanted to, but I couldn’t help it. He looked at me with a well-practiced side-eye.

  “Problem, Miss Smith?”

  I shook my head. “Well, I was annoyed at that very loud conversation you all had about me, as if everybody can’t hear everything between these rooms, right, Mr. Johnson?”

  “Damn right, young lady,” came from the next room over.

  “But,” I continued, “after all that Class A innuendo you just laid on me, I’m gonna have to give you a pass.”

  Denita and Sexual Undertones both laughed. He cocked his head. “Oh, I likes this one. Lemme check you out, girl.” He tilted my head to the side with gentle handling and placed his thermometer with a new black funnely thingy in my right ear.

  Again, it beeped in just a couple of seconds. He looked at the device and stuck out his bottom lip in a confused expression. “This ain’t right.”

  “Try her other ear,” Denita offered.

  He did so and, again, it beeped. “Well, damn.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. “What does it say?”

  Sexual Undertones shook his head again but answered, “Ninety-four-point-one.”

  “Same thing the first one said,” Denita practically yelled. “Maybe it ain’t broke after all.” But I think she forgot about how she slammed it on the counter.

  “There ain’t no way. Something’s wrong with these. Just get her BP.” Sexual Undertones handed Denita a cuff with a big rubber bulb hanging off of it, and she wrapped it around my arm. After she put a stethoscope in her ears and applied the cold disk to the inside of my elbow, she began to pump the bulb up. After just a few pumps, she said, “Oh, hell no.”

  “What is it?” Her coworker hovered. I was beginning to feel like a science experiment.

  “Trevor, check this yourself. Tell me I ain’t crazy.”

  Sexual—Trevor, grabbed his own stethoscope and repeated the process. After a couple of pumps, his eyes got wide, but he released a little valve on the rubber bulb and waited. When he was done, he looked at Denita, then back at me. “Stay here. We’re gonna get the doctor.” They both ran out of the room like I was contagious.

  Moments later, faster than any doctor I’d ever seen, a short, but shapely woman in a white coat that was embroidered with the name Dr. Janice Evans entered my room, pulled by both Denita and Trevor. They each held one of her hands.

  “Doc, you gotta check this one out.” Trevor was out of breath, but there was a hint of worry in his voice that had me whipping my head around between the three of them.

  “Okay, well, hi. I’m Doctor Evans.” I could only respond with an awkward grin. “Let me look you over, I guess. Tell me what’s been going on with you to bring you in here.”

  Where should I start. “Um...Well, last week I fell coming home from work, and I lost my memory. I woke up that morning, and I hurt everywhere.”

  “Explain the ‘hurt’,” she interjected as she took my pulse, frowning.

  “Just...pain...I guess. I was, and still have been, very stiff in my muscles and joints. There’s almost no food whatsoever that I can keep down without puking. And I tire very easily.”

  She picked up a clipboard with the paperwork I’d filled out. “But it says here you’re complaining of hormonal problems relating to your period.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s because the only thing I can eat is meat. Red is best. So, I’m craving iron, you know. Like I always do right before my period. Except, I haven’t started my period.”

  She listened to my chest with her stethoscope as I talked. “But you can eat? You have a pretty decent appetite as long as it’s meat?”

  “Oh yeah. I mean, if it was once mooing, I’m downright voracious.”

  Dr. Evans stared at me with pursed lips as if she had no clue what to say.

  “So, what’s wrong with me? Do I need antibiotics or something?”

  Trevor and Denita looked over her shoulder as she wrote a few things in my chart. They’re eyes simultaneously bugged out of their heads. Any other time, it would have been comical.

  “Well...” Dr. Evans cleared her throat before continuing. I could tell it was out of nervousness rather than need. “Your temperature is severely low. Your blood pressure is, eh, forty-eight over twenty-three. Your pulse is...fairly steady, actually, but at thirteen beats per minute. And it’s quite weak.”

  Clearly, she didn’t realize I never finished school because none of that meant anything to me. And she responded to my dead-eyed stare with an equal one.

  In the end, it was Denita that broke the news. “Bitch. You the walking dead.”

  "You're the Most Beautiful Dead Girl in the World."

  After Denita’s declaration, I’d think they’d take me straight to the ER, or some sort of medical research facility. Nope. Dr. Evans clumsily wrote in my chart a diagnosis of dehydration. Then Denita hooked me up to an I.V. She wore three pairs of gloves when she did it. I wondered if that was normal or if she expected me to have some rare, but contagious, dead-girl disease that she didn’t want to catch. Trevor high-tailed it out of there long before I was given the first of three bags of that saline or whatever.

  Denita was instructed to increase the flow to see if that did anything for my blood pressure. Typical medical speak. It’s all gibberish to me. All I know is that I laid on the hard, paper-covered bed in the clinic exam room for another hour and a half getting fluids. Annoyingly, the minute I stepped out the double doors and sat at the bus stop to wait, I was starving. Fucking again!

  A young man sat next to me, and he smelled soooo good. I asked him what kind of cologne or aftershave he used. He just looked at me with an odd expression. “None,” he said with an attitude. “Like, I had time for all that.”<
br />
  Another young man, who happened to be wearing the same exact colors as the first, stepped over from a few feet away. “You trying to hit on my boy, White Chocolate?” He turned to his friend and slapped him on the back, earning a grimace and a deep grunt from the first boy. “Yeah, boi! Ol’ girl wants the ‘D.’ She musta found out you a bad ass muthafucka. My boy got shot, through and through, and walking home.” He jumped up and down like being acquainted with the gunshot victim meant he deserved some accolades as well. “Come on, G. Show this bitch where you got hit at. Make her cream, dude.”

  Reluctantly, the first guy lifted his shirt to reveal a heavily bandaged area. Blood was seeping slowly through the white gauze.

  Oh...

  That couldn’t possibly be what smelled so good on the guy. Could it?

  Damn you, Miguel.

  I mumbled my apologies and turned away, making sure that I sat as far from the pair as possible once the bus arrived.

  It was dark by the time I made it back to my apartment. I was just entering the hall when Freddie came bounding down the stairs. I wasn’t really sure if I was in the mood for anything to do with him at that time, but I suppose I was too out of it to generate any “fuck off” cues because he came right up into my space. Oh, the smell that radiated from him made me want to fall to my knees and do naughty things.

  “Ugh. You smell weird.” O... Kay. So, the feeling was not mutual. He wrinkled his nose. “Did you go to the hospital?”

  Boy, that chemical sanitary smell must linger. “The community clinic actually. I haven’t been feeling well, and I wanted to get checked out.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. I recalled the night before when he sucked his finger after fucking me with it.

  “I’m not contagious or anything. No STDs.”

  Freddie smiled and shook his head. “I’m not worried about that. I already know you’re clean.”

  “Oh.” It was such a weird statement that I couldn’t figure out what to say in reply.