Punk Elegies by Allan MacDonell

Author:Allan MacDonell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2015-04-08T01:47:04+00:00

Scene Eleven: Cotton Fever

My knowing head was hanging upside down inside a toilet bowl on an unseasonably warm August night. My smart mouth heaved what might be the last gasps of my life into rusty porcelain. I’d done a stupid intravenous thing.

Viva had taken over a vacant Canterbury apartment, two floors down. I’d spent the early evening among her guests at a dinner party, smoking cigarettes, drinking gin, and eating potato soup pureed from Dumpster-recovered produce.

I’d been first to arrive, alone. Wet and pink from the shower, Viva had been selecting her party costume. Nothing satisfied her. She couldn’t even pick a pair of panties.

It was unnecessary to inform Viva that I had been shooting up phenobarbital prior to dropping by. No one needed to be told I was that lame.

Over dessert—shoplifted Tootsie Pops—I seemed to be arguing with Michael Schmuck about something that meant very little to me. For a moment there, Schmuck and I looked to be actually coming to an agreement. In fact, we were competing to make the same point. Suddenly, I was very cold.

I retreated upstairs, to our place, where Tommie and I lived, to put on a sweater. About halfway up the stairwell, it felt like a cutting mix of ground glass had been sprinkled into the joints of my arms and legs. That’s not all—metal shavings had been dusted between the bones of my spine and shoulders.

Physical pain like this had never afflicted me, before or since. To describe it beggars exaggeration and hyperbole. I was too sick to cry.

No one was home at my place. The lack of witness was cold comfort. The Arctic winds of Los Angeles breezed in through our open apartment windows. Freezing and hurting, I knew it was ninety degrees outside, but the breeze felt like icicles shredding my skin. Hobbled, I shut the windows, shivering, aching, and sucking for breath.

Keen-minded, I suspected that this discomfort had originated in those Phenobarbital injections, and in the gin. Vomit, I deduced, was on my horizon. My wise move was to collapse on the bathroom floor.

A small window above the bathtub was open into an airshaft. Across the shaft was the bathroom window of the apartment shared by Belinda from The Go-Go’s and another yellow-haired girl who had no real sympathies for me.

I retched. Pain shot its bolts, overriding every nerve ending. I bit back a howl. Belinda and her unsympathetic roommate might hear a howl and would surely mock me. I pictured three girls standing, looking down at me, sharing two beers and one cigarette, and mimicking my agony as I squirmed at their feet like a worm in the sun.

I could no more stand and close that bathtub window than I could fly up the chimney of the fireplace of the apartment I did not have.

A groan eked out. A loud one erupted; three or four more followed. The sounds came as if some large, wounded animal had sprawled out inside of me to give birth and was struggling to break free.

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