The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  “Promote our vitamins and you’ll never have to pay for a round of golf again,” they’d told him.

  “No problem-o,” Dr. Cogswell had replied.

  To justify this to his conscience, Dr. Cogswell thought about all the good things vitamin C does for the body, and he figured that even if the extra vitamin C didn’t do any good, it wasn’t going to hurt anything. He thought this even though one of the side effects of excess vitamin C is headaches.

  Also: kidney stones.

  These three doctors had specific tasks they wanted my mother to do and specific medicines they wanted her to take. Doctors’ guesses are almost always accompanied by such things. Doctors know human beings feel more confident about convalescence if they have something to do or take, even if whatever they tell people to do or take doesn’t make much of a difference one way or another.

  In conjunction with more rest, Dr. Wiley prescribed my mother a miniature squishy soccer ball and told her to mash it in her hands when she felt stressed. He also prescribed loads of aspirin.

  On top of loads of aspirin, Dr. Cobb also prescribed loads of sexual activity. He then prescribed a night of drinking and dancing and sex—maybe with him?

  Dr. Cogswell said three oranges a day, tons of strawberries, carrots with every meal, vitamin C supplements from a certain vitamin company—“No, no, Mrs. Horvath, it has to be Life-a-Holic Vitamin C!”—and don’t forget the aspirin.

  *

  How do I know all this?

  A handful of years ago, in the midst of a rough emotional stretch, I decided to spend the better part of the winter holiday season tracking down all of my mother’s former doctors and getting them blitzed out of their minds. I then got them to confess about all the ways they had failed to save her life.

  The merriest of Christmases it was.

  All three of them remembered her, which would have been unbelievable if not for this little tidbit about Mom that I have been loath to relate and leave to the words of Dr. Cobb after his fourth double vodka soda:

  “Your mother had the most fantastic bazoombas any doctor could hope to lay a stethoscope on.”

  Upon receiving her instructions and prescriptions from these worthless dirtbags, my mother decided her best course of action was to follow everything they told her to do to the letter. This was, in her words, “throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick.” She figured something out of this mess of advice would have to get the job done.

  She mashed a squishy ball in her hands when she felt nervous or upset, took a mid-afternoon nap every day, started surprising my father in the nude in the hopes that her most fantastic bazoombas would bring about more intimate moments with him, and when he wasn’t around, she rubbed up against the dishwasher as it was running.

  She made fruit salads with lots of oranges and strawberries; she put oranges and carrots on chicken; she drank orange juice, carrot juice, took fistfuls of Life-a-Holic Vitamin C supplements, and ingested gobs of aspirin (which upset her stomach and gave her heartburn).

  How do I know all this?

  Amongst my mother’s effects after she passed was an explicit and detailed diary chronicling her long war with headaches. The intent here being, I think, that someday a memoir about her life would be published, something along the lines of: “Irreverent but warm-hearted Midwestern housewife overcomes debilitating headaches and all the stupid people in her life without losing her mind.” And yes, to answer the obvious, it was very uncomfortable and sad reading about how she used to get off on the dishwasher.

  There are just some things a son should never know about his mother. Amorous encounters with vigorous “Pots and Pans” cycles is one of those things. That would be the very uncomfortable part. The very sad part is that, even after all this effort, she still had the headaches.

  Don’t ever let anyone tell you hard work always pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it does you no good whatsoever.

  3

  In lieu of relief of any sort, and becoming increasingly concerned that her war with headaches wasn’t going to end in a best-selling book and movie of the week, my mother decided to use a considerable chunk of the meager savings she and my father had cobbled together over the years to venture to northern Indiana to see yet one more brain specialist: Dr. Ragan, allegedly the best in the state.

  What did he do? According to my mother’s diary, he dumped all over the other doctors she had gone to see and then chided her for not coming to him before anyone else.

  “Why didn’t you come to me first?” he said.

  “How would I have known to do that?” my mother replied, her hopes already sinking that this “arrogant butthead” (her diary words verbatim) would be able to help her.

  “Because I’m the best,” Dr. Ragan said.

  “Says who?”

  “Says the best damned neurologist in the state of Indiana, Mrs. Horvath.”

  “And who would that be?”

  Dr. Ragan grinned, took the two thumbs God had blessed him with and pointed them at himself.

  “Ah, I see,” my mother said.

  With that cleared up, Dr. Ragan began talking about migraines. “That’s what it’s gotta be, Mrs. H. That’s what it always is.”

  “The other doctors didn’t seem to think so.”

  “And they’re dumbasses.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the best damned neurologist in the state of Indiana.”

  “Who’s that again?”

  Dr. Ragan guffawed at my mother’s needle-sharp wit and asked her about the squishy ball, the aspirin, the dishwasher, and the vitamin C.

  “None of this helps?” he said.

  “Seeing as I’m here, I guess not,” my mother said.

  “Migraines migraines migraines!” Dr. Ragan said.

  “But that doesn’t fit with some of my symptoms.”

  “Do you want it to be something else, Mrs. H? Something worse?” Dr. Ragan asked.

  “Of course not, but some women friends I have with migraines—”

  “—say you’ve got migraines?”

  “No, they don’t say that at all.”

  “I suggest finding some better friends with migraines then,” Dr. Ragan said, scribbling on a pad. “All right. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Sometimes I find it useful to have patients read their ailment out loud. Helps them find the courage to accept it.”

  Ragan held up the pad. “Now what does this say?”

  “I have no idea,” my mother said.

  “I’d say you’ve got problems far worse than headaches if you’ve never learned to read.”

  “I read fine, doc.”

  “Then what’s the problem here?”

  “I can’t see.”

  “Literally or...not literally?”

  “Literally!”

  “Since when?”

  “Since about ten seconds ago. My vision’s blurry all of a sudden and my head hurts.”

  “Well then, we’ll say it together. You ready?”

  (I believe at this point my mother might have been crying.)

  “I’ll take that as a ‘Heck, yeah, Dr. R!’” Ragan said. “Now, repeat after me…”

  Even with the abrupt and terrifying onset of vision loss during her appointment, Dr. Ragan did nothing more than scan my mother’s brain.

  In answer to her exasperation over another repeat of the same old test, he assured her it was just to be on the safe side and that if it did so happen to be something other than migraines—“Extremely impossible,” he said—then he would be able to make a much better guess than Drs. Cogswell, Wiley, and Cobb.

  “I don’t know if I told you this already, but they’re dumbasses. Pardon my French,” he said.

  “That’s not French,” my mother said.

  “My, aren’t you feisty for
somebody with a serious migraine issue,” Dr. Ragan said. “Must not hurt that bad.”

  Once the scan was finished, Dr. Ragan did as the other doctors had done before him. He took the floppy plastic sheets that had images of the inside of my mother’s head and analyzed them for anything that might give him a clue as to what to guess. What he was looking for was something like a smear. If he saw such a thing, then his guesses could be narrowed, and if the smear was in the right place, Dr. Ragan could refer her to a neurosurgeon, who would then cut her head open and possibly get the smear out of there. Like Drs. Cogswell and Cobb though, no smear did he see, so Dr. Ragan sent her home and told her to keep doing what the others had told her to do (“They’re not really dumbasses, you know,” he had said. “Just some healthy competitiveness coming out.”) and added damp cloths to the forehead, dark rooms, and silence whenever flare-ups occurred, along with various migraine medications.

  “The best thing about migraines is that you can take migraine medicines for them,” he said.

  “But I don’t have migraines!” my mother pleaded.

  “Stubbornness is a piss-poor cure, Mrs. H,” Dr. Ragan said, sweeping her out of his office.

  And so, my mother, without proper medical training herself and therefore no better ideas than Dr. Ragan, went home and implemented her newly tweaked regimen.

  Big shock: she still had headaches.

  This was because there did so happen to be a smear on the floppy sheet, but it had been too small to be seen by the human eye. Over the next few months though, the smear, also known as a cancerous brain tumor, began to stretch its legs at an exponential rate, gifting my mother with intermittent seizures as well as the occasional blackout.

  Livid, Mom went back to Dr. Ragan and demanded better guesses, to which Dr. Ragan refused, electing to go the easier route and rebuke her for her lack of courage instead.

  “You gotta suck it up with these migraines, Mrs. H.”

  “Why don’t you go suck up your own dick, Dr. R.?” Mom snapped.

  “Margie!” my father interjected from behind a three-year-old Sports Illustrated. The bleeding of the modest Horvath savings account had forced him off the sidelines. “He’s the best neurologist in the state of Indiana,” he said.

  Dr. Ragan thumbed himself again.

  “Okay, Robert,” my mother said, gathering herself. “You suck up his dick then. And while you’re at it have him stick those fucking thumbs up your ass, too!”

  Dr. Ragan hid his hands, thumbs and all, behind his back.

  “We’re Bible-believing Pentecostals, sir,” the old man said to Dr. Ragan. “And we don’t talk like that. At least I don’t.”

  “Buttfucking Cintons! Buttfucking Cintons! Who says that every other day?” my mother screamed at him.

  In case you’re wondering, this exchange could not be found in the diary. But then, it didn’t need to be. I was there for this one.

  *

  “Still no smear!” Dr. Ragan said as he handed the floppy sheets to my mother after doing yet another scan. “Do we need to go over a certain word on a certain piece of paper again?”

  “What about this?” my mother asked, pointing at what looked like a blotch the size of a key lime on the floppy sheet.

  “What about it?”

  “What is that?”

  “That, Mrs. Horvath, is your brain.”

  “And it looks like a smear on my brain. A big one.”

  “For God’s sake, Margie! Do you think you can read one of those things better than he can?” my father shouted.

  But my mother would not be denied this time. She got, as the youths like to say, right up in Dr. Ragan’s grill.

  “This is a smear!” my mother said.

  “Ridiculous! There’s just something goofy going on with the...you know, the scanner thingamajig,” Dr. Ragan said, scribbling on his pad again. “It’s been doing that all day.”

  “Enough!” my mother said, taking me by the hand. “Frankie, we’re going.”

  And off we went. To Ohio this time, the world-famous Cleveland Clinic. The old man, kicking and screaming, with us.

  Once there, my mother showed the floppy sheets she had refused to return to Dr. Ragan to a Dr. Scanlan, considered throughout the medical world as the best damned neurologist in the history of damned neurology, and apparently that’s what it took for us to get the correct guess, as he shot one look at the floppies and said this:

  “Looks like a big smear to me.”

  “Ha! I told you,” my mother said to my father.

  “A smear like that is not good news, by the way,” Dr. Scanlan pointed out.

  Worse yet, the smear was now too big to be operated on and Dr. Scanlan knew from past mishaps of other surgeons who had operated on such big smears that if this smear was operated on, there was a high probability my mother would die during the procedure.

  “What about chemo?” she asked him.

  “An excellent idea if you wish to die feeling even worse than you already do.”

  “What do I do then, doctor?”

  Dr. Scanlan paused, then informed her there was nothing she nor he nor anybody could do.

  “The only thing to do is hope the smear will go away on its own,” he said finally.

  “Why would it go away now?” my mother said.

  Dr. Scanlan stroked his beard and kept his eyes down. He had no idea what to tell her. He knew that smears don’t up and disappear, but what else could he say? Beg a higher power? Maybe that would work?

  “There are no higher powers, goddammit,” the old man moaned, wringing an issue of Popular Mechanics from the Carter administration in his hands.

  At the demand of my now panic-stricken father (he had believed my mother had been making the headaches out to be more than they were), Dr. Scanlan offered a guess as to how much time she had left. This is another piece of information that patients expect doctors to be able to give to them despite its rank unfairness, as doctors are not the sorts of beings who exist out of time and therefore have the gift of second sight. They have a hard enough time finding smears on floppy sheets.

  Nevertheless, Dr. Scanlan offered my father a super specific period of time (two to eighteen months) in which he could expect the love of his life to die and told him (and her and me) to go home and wait for it.

  “Is it possible I could make it to Frankie’s seventeenth birthday?” my mother asked, patting the head of my father as he wept into his hat. (I had taken to standing in a corner and pressing my face as hard as I could into the wall.)

  “Sure. Maybe. I don’t know,” said Dr. Scanlan. It was one of the few times he could get away without having the answer, and the good doctor felt his skin tingle. “I really don’t know.”

  *

  How do I know how Dr. Scanlan had felt?

  He was the last leg of that happy little holiday doctor tour way back when. I drove to Cleveland, found him at his favorite watering hole, and he told me, well into his sixth gin and tonic.

  Or as he called it, “Gee-and-tee.”

  “Other than a nice, stiff ‘gee-and-tee,’ nothing makes my skin tingle more than when I can tell somebody I don’t know what the hell is going to happen and there’s nothing I can do to help them anymore,” Dr. Scanlan had said.

  He’d slurred that, by the way, as six stiff “gee-and-tees” tend to send one’s “bee-ae-see” skyrocketing to dangerous levels, but I have cleaned his words up for clarity’s sake. As to how he remembered my mother so vividly, Dr. Scanlan, even bombed out of his gourd, had managed a lascivious smile and familiar-looking wink; and just so there wasn’t any confusion as to what that wink meant, he added this: “Yowza.”

  4

  I’ve returned to the Gladys Marie Fenwick Memorial Elevator. Triumphantly too, if I do say so myself, after conducting an exhaustive search for Sparky in the
sixth floor hallway and restroom.

  I realize that most good parents, in pursuit of their missing child, would have streaked down the stairs as fast as their legs could carry them, taking great care to look as harried and distraught and terrified as possible. Like anybody else, I thought about doing those things too, but I’m of the opinion that the elevator, even with its recent stoppage (which I’m still convinced was the boy’s doing), is the safer bet.

  The unassailability of my logic aside, I can’t help but wonder if I’m being too rational given the circumstances, and that for appearances’ sake it would be better for me to stick to what’s expected of me and keep my look as harried, distraught, and terrified as I can—something that’s tough to do while standing still, humming along to elevator music—even at the risk of falling down the stairs. If necessary, when I reach the lobby, I’ll run like hell out of the elevator to reassure any lookers-on that while I’m trying to be smart and safe by using the technological advances available to me in order to maximize the chances of my search’s success, I’m also just as harried, distraught, and terrified as any good parent with a missing kid would be.

  Besides, Danica’s already got the Jonathan Frederick Fenwick Stairway covered. That’s right, she’s helping me.

  I know, a Satanist helping a parent find their missing child. The mind reels.

  Though it has occurred to me she’s figured out who Sparky is and, through the guise of assisting me, is trying to get to him first so she can snatch him away. Perhaps what’s going on here is a race: a race between both sides of that endless spiritual war I blathered on about earlier.

  I must say I like the sound of that, of being in a race. Especially when the outcome doesn’t depend on whether or not I’m in superior physical condition.

  Gonna be tons of fun to see who makes it to the bottom first: me or her. The future of the human race may depend on it. Stay tuned.

  5

  During the last few weeks of her life, and at the request of the old man (his erratic Christian faith having been recovered now that he no longer had any other options), my mother begrudgingly allowed him to procure the services of a healer in the hopes that he would in turn procure the services of the Almighty Himself, who would then, properly procured, reach down from the heavens and rub out that cancer smear.