Dora: A Headcase

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  On the couch is an alien. A mutant. A man whose very pants are overtaking him. He tosses and turns with his arm over his face. He grabs at it. “Whoa,” I yell, “he’s gonna try to steer it!” I twirl my Farrah hair around my finger violently. I silently wonder if he’s going to cum in his own face like Old Faithful.

  “Lemme see that shit,” Little Teena says from up front. I position the laptop on the seat so he can see it.

  “Holy mother of god!” Little Teena bellows. “He’s on the floor! On all fours! He’s … he’s trying to make it to the door? Wait! He’s grabbed the trenchcoat … wait for it, wait for it, he’s UPRIGHT, folks,” Little Teena announces boxing match style. We laugh our asses off.

  “ Turn the engine on and pull up,” I go. “Switch to the GPS tracker.” Ave Maria mans the laptop in the back seat, and shazzam. Sig becomes a pulsing red throb on a virtual city on the computer screen.

  Now here is where you separate the boys from the men. For this mobile shoot to work, we’ve got to have stamina. We’ve got to wait for it. I figure minimum an hour, maximum, two. Yeah, I know all the ads say “if your erection lasts longer than four hours,” but Sig’s a Dr. So I’m guessing he’s too anal to wait four hours sitting alone in his office with a monster dong.

  We shoot the shit in the car. Ave Maria’s mom’s having migraines. Meaning our stock of headbanger reduction pills just got filled. Little Teena’s almost saved up enough for the Nikon D3X Digital SLR camera. The expeed image processing on that bad boy assures breathtakingly rich image fidelity and reduces noise, even at high ISOs. I narrate a little of what I’ve read from Marlena’s Mantegazza book. “Check it. Mantegazza used to prescribe coca to his patients. He wrote that to a man in imminent danger of losing his life through nervous exhaustion, he’d dope him up to the nines. Said coca was like a billion times superior to opium.”

  “Whoa,” Ave Maria goes.

  Just under two hours later, we have movement.

  Ave Maria puts her finger on the red pulsing dot. It jumps around spastically. “I wish he’d make up his mind,” Ave Maria complains, “he’s in, he’s out, then in again … what’s he doing in there? Gyawd. Is he OCD?”

  I rub a see hole in my window with my angora elbow.

  From the front Little Teena laughs and rips a mega fart.

  Ave Maria wails. “You douche! Oooooohhhhhhhh maaaa-aaaaan dude! You fucking hotboxing us? Open the fucking windows!”

  When my window lowers I see my doctor’s front building door open a crack. “Shut up! It’s him!” I go.

  “What the fuck?” Little Teena says.

  Nothing comes out of the door.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  But we all know there’s a man behind that crack.

  I’m holding my breath, then realize it, then curse myself, then do it again.

  “Fuck,” I say, “it’s the cheese…” Because a cop car pulls up. But it’s not a cop car. It’s a black and white taxi cab. That’s when I see my shrink, my nemesis, my Sig exit the building. I get a baffling chest pang and my heart races like I’m on fucking speedies.

  But what comes out of the building I’m not ready for. What comes out of the building looks something like a medieval figure. Like a creature that might ascend a tower and you know, ring the bells. A perfect Quasimodo.

  “Holy jesus fuck,” whispers Little Teena.

  There in front of us, wearing a truly flasher trench coat, is the Sig, trying old man desperately to shove his dick down one leg of his pants. Trying to drape the bottom of the trenchcoat over his bulging crotch. Pushing the brown trenchcoat fabric down while it pushes back up with Hitleresque authority.

  “He looks crippled,” Ave Maria whispers. We crack up again, but we also get low in the car and try to keep our laughing quieter.

  Sig looks one way, then the other, then sort of launches himself into the cab, losing a shoe, the cab ripping away with a screech.

  “Holy holy fuck,” repeats Little Teena. “Are you fucking getting this? You recording?”

  “Oh shit,” I yell, realizing I’m sitting in the car like a dumb blonde NOT FILMING OR RECORDING DICK.

  That’s when god appears. If god were an outrageously gorgeous angry Native American girl with a sheath of ebony hair and a shard of black slit your throat glass around her neck.

  Obsidian yanks my door open and blasts her way into the car and shoves me over going “GO GO GO! I got it! I got it all!” with a hand-held mini digi-cam cupped beautifully in her hand. We’re all grabbing our ears since she’s both shouting as us via Bluetooth and shouting at us for realz.

  “Floor it!” I go. My ears and skin ringing with longing for a girl with ink black hair who would never, ever wear a wig.

  Under the maze of Seattle’s snaking overpasses we plunge. Past the retarded baseball field with the giant metal fish architecture. Through the dumb ass tunnels wearing dangling ivy. Rain making everything blurry.

  “I got ten bucks that says he’s going to the Blue Ball up on Capitol Hill,” Little Teena wagers.

  “The SM club? No way. I say he’s going up to the bouge gay hook up park – to buy a buttload of downers. Or get that monster sucked off. Besides, ten bucks is a pussy bet. Make it fifty and you’re on,” Obsidian says. My mouth fills with spit and admiration.

  “Yep, it’s the Blue Ball,” Little Teena says from the front as we run a red light in pursuit. And I’ll take that bet.”

  “You’re full of shit. Look. We’re headed straight for the park,” Obsidian counters.

  “Hot Tamales, anyone?” Ave Maria produces a box and doses us with cinnamon.

  I study the computer screen. We’re not going to the Blue Ball. Or the hook up park. We’re on Seneca street. We’re in traffic. We’re gonna be fucked for a parking place. We’re going to Virginia Mason Clinic – downtown Seattle. ER. I know. How? That’s where they took my mom when she ate her bottle of pills. “It’s a hospital target,” I say.

  In the car I rifle off instructions: “We’re gonna have to stage a recon by triangulating. We’ll be in the ER remember, so you gotta go with the mis-en-scène. You gotta post yourselves … you gotta go both guerilla and cinéma vérité. Obsidian? You get the micro cam. Little Teena? You pin one to your shoulder like cops do. I got the H4n and … Ave Maria, you got the spy cam?”

  She nods and spits out a wad of Hot Tamales out the window of the Jag. Then she snags a costume from the small suitcase. “A hospital! I’m perfect, I’m perfect!” she shouts.

  I have to admit it, her outfit kicks ass. She holds up a weird striped pinafore of some sort. At least I think that’s what it is. “Where’d you fucking get that … that apron thing?” I ask. “It’s awesome.”

  “She flips her shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair and begins to change into her costume. “It’s a candy striper suit. Get it? I like the way it makes me look Florence Nightingale-y.”

  I laugh. She doesn’t look Florence Nightingale-y. She kinda looks like she shoulda been in Friday the 13th. Part I.

  Little Teena rubs his false detective’s badge and speeds up. “Serpico,” he goes.

  I shake my hair back like a perfect Breck girl. Obsidian captures her black mane with a scrunchie.

  We all know exactly who we are.

  Except then in the back of the Jag Obsidian rubs my thigh making friction. My breathing gets weird. All up in my throat instead of my chest. Fuck. Please god of girls please do not let me pass out. I take a huge ass breath in. I put my head down. The Farrah hair is so heavy it feels like I might suffocate.

  I put one hand on each white denim thigh. Palms up. I rub my cherry lip gloss lips together. I close my eyes. I breath in for seven seconds. I hold my breath for seven seconds. I breath out for seven seconds. I breathe in for seven seconds. Hold it. I do it seven times. I think maybe my mother taught me this when I was seven but can’t be sure.

  There’s a girl calm people don’t know about. It’s a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace
. It doesn’t come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It’s born from being a not woman yet. It’s free flowing and invisible. It’s the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter. In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve.

  When I open my eyes, I’m girl clear.

  “You gotta pass him,” I say calmly to Little Teena. I look over at Obsidian. She doesn’t smile. Smiling’s for pussies. I take my sunglasses off and meet my own gaze in the rearview. “Step on it,” I go. “We gotta get there first,” I say to the rear view mirror. “Park illegally. We have to shadow him when he arrives.”

  13.

  IN THE ER AT THE VIRGINIA MASON CLINIC THERE’S A dingy fluorescent glow – the pale light of death and the smell of human fluids mixed with Lysol. The stalls for incoming fucked people all have sad little blue curtains. Everyone in scrubs is a trainee. You can just tell. The bags of exhaustion under all their eyes, the look of maybe going Columbine, the desperate way they wheel people in and take vitals – somebody’s up all night hand shaking with cocaine tremors as they draw blood.

  Little Teena’s parked his girth at the nurse’s desk making fictional inquiries about a missing person. Pinned to his shoulder is an Olympus Mini Digital Video recorder that looks pretty much like when cops talk to their shoulders at crime scenes. One benefit to the Olympus Mini? Its sleek and thin compactness. You’d think they’d be suspicious of him, but they aren’t. The trick is in the details. In the perfect 1970s brown blazer. And in the ever-so-slightly wrinkled button-down. And the shit brown and yellow striped tie. Also, shoes – if you get the shoes right, people will believe anything. You don’t have to be who you say you are. You only have to be what people have seen and come to believe on TV. Because we’re TV-headed now.

  Ave Maria has somehow commandeered a hospital gift shop cart filled with lame-ola shit. Shampoos and juice boxes. Artificial flowers and sad ass balloons on sticks. Stuffed animals and coffee mugs that say “Get well soon.”

  I’m in the ER waiting hall on a Naugahyde bench with my arms crossed over my pink angora chest. My head’s down like I’m very, very worried about someone close to me. But really I’m just adjusting the levels of the H4n recorder in my Dora purse.

  Obsidian is down the hall a little mopping the floor. Like the Chief in Cuckoo’s Nest. No one even looks at her. She doesn’t even exist. Motherfuckers.

  Secured to her wrist watch though is the Aiptek Mini PenCam. Weighing in at only 45 grams and measuring 3 cm × 2.7 cm × 8.6 cm, it’s the world’s smallest and lightest megapixel digital video recorder. Her head jerks up from mopping and I follow her gaze down the hall.

  Our lead actor.

  Half walking, half scooting toward the ER incoming desk, comes my man Sig and his member. His head jerks left when two Filipino nurses seem to chuckle. Poor Sig – he has to explain his condition to a none-too-impressed RN dude wearing a crocodile tooth hanging from a chain. Sig’s pathetic. He’s all bent over. He keeps clearing his throat, gesturing toward the little commandant.

  I know what the Sig is thinking though. I do. He’s thinking the guy’s crocodile tooth is a masculinity talisman. Probably to ward off sexual impotence.

  What? I never said I didn’t listen.

  I whisper “Tiger one to Bat Boy-over. The chicken is squawking” into my Bluetooth. My voice shoots around the posse. Everyone is in position. Everyone knows exactly who they are. We are our technologies.

  Crocodile dude steers Sig to a stall and gives him a hospital smock and a blue blanket to cover himself with – talk about pitching a tent. Jesus. The size of that thing.

  The room on the other side of Sig is empty – the gurney all lined up with a shitty-ass hospital pillow waiting for the next victim. I’ve always hated these rooms. All the save a life gadgets and machinery looming above you like you are in the movie Alien. I bet it’s germ city, too. I know everything supposed to be all sterilized but I’m guessing it’s like a fucking stadium urinal in there. I bet there’s dead skin cells and hair and you know, fluids everywhere. Like in hotel rooms.

  The whole place smells like someone shit air freshener.

  Ave Maria wheels her hope of tards cart close to Sig’s stall. I meet up with Ave Maria and pretend to look at things on the cart, fingering the mugs and stuffed rodents, dabbing my eyes with a tissue.

  Crocodile RN then puts an ice-pack on Sig’s wang and pushes and says, “Hold that down, sir.”

  Sig lets out a muffled little yelp.

  Various white coats come in and say serious things to Sig. Ask him questions.

  At Ave Maria’s cart, I put my hand on a mug with a mutant looking stuffed monkey attached to it. The monkey’s head’s too big. Like a Down Syndrome monkey. Who would feel better if you gave them shit like this?

  I point my Dora purse in the direction of Sig’s stall. We’re all recording – me, Little Teena, Ave Maria, Obsidian. We’re transmitting via Bluetooth to the laptop on the floor of the Jag in the parking lot. This, my friends, is how it’s done. Quiet on the set.

  Three. Two. One. Action.

  “Mr. Freud, have you taken any medication for erectile dysfunction?”

  “Certainly not,” Sig snaps.

  White coat nods and asks the same question using different words.

  “Do they pay you to be an idiot in training?” Sig blasts.

  Oh man. Poor Siggy.

  The white coat types information into a computer and talks right over Sig’s objections. “Priapism” we hear. “Treated with aspiration. Needle. Penis.”

  “Fuck me,” we hear Little Teena whisper over the Bluetooths. “They’re gonna drain his dick!”

  I grind my teeth. Then I realize I’m grinding my teeth.

  “Let’s go over the options, Mr. Freud,” the doctor says to the doctor.

  It’s right about then that a disturbing commotion occurs. Down the hall, shooting straight for us, is an adolescent in a wheelchair. Picking up speed. The closer he gets, the more I see that he’s … oh christ. Um, he’s, you know, Special Olympics? Too smiley? Bangs cut too high? Man. What the fuck? Did he escape his keepers? My palms get sweaty. I shake my Farrah head “no.” This is gonna fuck our shit up.

  There’s something I have to tell you. When I was in third grade, I was playing foursquare with the girls in my class, and from way over where the Special Ed kids’ classroom was and over into our supposedly normal kids compound – came an adolescent too-smiley. He walked right up to our foursquare game, all the other girls started shrieking, then he grabbed me, bent me back like in the movies, and French kissed the fuck out of me. With the big tongue of a special ed. It was the most humiliating thing ever. Everyone pointed and ran.

  Except me. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard it bled. To this day I have no idea what that was about. But I do know it was intense – what happened between us.

  So as bellowing barreling Special Olympics comes zooming by, getting all up in our scene, I feel a tinge of admiration. Look at him go! Yelling like an idiot. Then I see hospital orderlies in pursuit – but Special Olympics ditches them and shoots right past us laughing his ass off. We catch each other’s eyes for a second, and he winks! I can’t help but laugh a little under my breath.

  And here come the orderlies, slip slide running after him in aqua-colored scrubs with little booties over their shoes – christ – one of ’em nearly busts his ass rounding the corner.

  I mean c’mon. What the hell was that? Close one.

  I signal Obsidian to try to mop nearer to Sig. The doctor is saying something about intractable erections when – jesus. Here he comes again! Special Olympics! He’s outsmarted the orderlies in the maze of hospital hallways. I take a closer look at him as he approaches – it’s like he’s drawn to us like a magnet – like he understands where the action is – some sixth sense in that
big old head telling him to run with it. He yells something absolutely incomprehensible. Suddenly I see him differently. He’s a rebel without a cause. He’s the id unleashed, bringing utter chaos to the pristine pukey halls of an institution.

  When he gets to Obsidian – oh jesus. He grabs her ass. With a little yelp and sly smile. I’ll be goddamned. Even Special Olympics dudes get horn dog. He nearly loses his arm when she bats at him with the mop handle. He squawks, but he’s still smiling. My man.

  Then there’s more shouting. Sig bursts out with, “You plan to stab my prick with a giant needle and suck blood, you fucking jackal!” Special Olympics seems to bellow out a response. The blue blanket of Sig’s dignity falls to the floor. I can see Sig’s scrawny old man legs. I can almost see up his hospital gown. Sweat forms on my upper lip and under my boobs and between my ass cheeks. I’m hot. I’ ve got a fucking angora sweater on and this headful of hair – how many pounds does this thing weigh?

  Then I hear “Mr. Freud, have you ingested any narcotics?”

  Momentarily, the entire place freezes. Even smiley.

  “Fucking get moving you goddamn imbeciles,” Sig shouts, breaking the trance, and oh man, then he’s really Tourettezing out on them … more nurses appear outta nowhere.

  “Tango one to Tango two,” Ave Maria whispers, “it’s on … ”

  People in Sig’s room say things I can’t hear. “Everybody move in,” I go.

  Sig’s waving his arms around as Little Teena corners an orderly closer to the scene. He’s asking to see a real doctor when Ave Maria pretends her cart is stuck right in front of his drama. And for the briefest of moments, Sig locks eyes with me, the mug with a monkey in my hand. He stops shouting and stares.

  Shit. Does he see me?

  I point the mug monkey at him and hold my breath. Get well soon.

  I have a pop-up thought. See me. These are my eyes. My mouth. I hold the stupid mug out between us.