ham fisted theatrics

On Wednesday morning I drive to my rescheduled doctor’s appointment well on time. I am reading a Joe Strummer biography right now and I listen to Disc 1 of “The Story Of The Clash” in the car. I hear a line I’ve never heard before in “This Is Radio Clash:” “Please save us, not the whales.” How we have lived on a Joe Strummer-less planet for seven years now is beyond me.

My route takes me down Wilshire through Koreatown. There’s a sort of mini-downtown in Koreatown before you reach L.A.’s actual downtown. A lot of old signs up on spindly scaffoldings at the tops of buildings, the kind you get shot dead at the foot of if you’re the villain in the climax of a noir movie.

Adding to the noir effect: I drive by the Pacific Dining Car, beloved by James Ellroy, my favorite living two-fisted L.A. “detectives beating the shit out of a guy they’ve chained to the radiator in 1956” author, and I think mentioned in a bunch of his books. I want to be cruising by in a big black tank of an old car while me and Lucky Luciano half-joke about killing JFK, but I will have to settle for puttering by in my Jetta by myself on my way to the ear nose and throat doctor.

I park in a parking garage and I don’t have any cash on me. I think about one of the things I have to think about now and decide to hit up a Wells Fargo across the street to get money to pay for parking. There is one ATM in front of the bank, and a man with a gray ponytail is cleaning it. I sort of stand there until he notices me. “It’ll be a while,” he says without turning around. I ask if there are any other ATMs, like inside the bank. He tells me there aren’t. I decide to return to this bank, this one bank left in the modern world that isn’t just an anchor for like fifty ATMs, after my appointment.

There are lots of older folks in the ear nose and throat doctor’s waiting room, and this gets me thinking about mortality. Joe Strummer died when he was fifty. I’ll be 50 in 2035. I like that, it seems like a long way off, even though I’m sure I will continue to experience days and years exponentially faster until I’m fifty after a period of time that feels like I should only be about twenty-six.

An old man in the waiting room has a hard time hearing the receptionist when she calls his name, which is exactly what you want to see happen in this waiting room. I’m sorry, but you do. If someone’s nose had fallen down their throat while they sat there reading a magazine, we would’ve exhausted that waiting room’s comic potential.

The receptionist talks quietly to her kid on the phone. “If you’re hungry,” she says. “make a peanut butter sandwich.”

Eventually a nurse comes to get me. On our way to the room where I will wait for the doctor, we pass a painting of a chicken wearing a surgical mask.

I am at the doctor because for the past few months my throat has been bugging the crap out of me. It’s gotten progressively worse to the point where talking is frequently or with any volume is not fun. And this is not fun, because I am a performer, but more importantly, a proclaimer of drunken opinions.

I tell the doctor my symptoms, and then she numbs up my nose and sticks a camera through a nostril and down my throat. She doesn’t see anything that worries her. Then we talk some more, and finally a distinction is drawn between “throat” and “neck” that a second grader or a dog could understand instantly, but it takes me a while. Then it is determined that my thing is more of a neck thing than a throat thing. The doctor explains her thinking to me in detail before giving me a course of action, which is neat to hear, and comforting. In short, she doesn’t know what’s up but she thinks we should try some things to narrow it down.

She recommends a week of vocal rest, which she defines as not talking at all. “I know,” she says. “It’s incredibly difficult.” She tells the story of a nurse in this very building who was going to go to Nashville and record a country CD, but her throat was massively fucked up, so she communicated with a pen and pad all day every day leading up to when she was supposed to leave to record her CD. And the rest did the trick and she went and sang. She describes the nurse as a “motivated patient,” a phrase I love. It makes me want to be a motivated patient, to monk the fuck up for seven days. Also she says, use a heating pad, and I’m going to prescribe you some steroids. The steroids, she says, might make you feel weird, like you can’t sleep, or like you're very happy, or very sad. Or they might just be fine. She restates her “I don’t know, but we’ll try this” thesis, and says maybe the rest and the drugs will “break the cycle,” if there is in fact a cycle. I very much want to break the cycle, because we are going to Comic Con at the end of July and I want to talk to everybody. Fucking LOST is going to be two booths down from us. No joke.

On the drive home, I listen to the radio. I end up on a poetry show, which sounds like a parody of NPR. “It’s a sestina,” the guest poet says about the poem she’s about to read. “Mmm!” says the host, like someone has just offered her homemade cobbler or some oral sex.

When I get back to the apartment, I rasp out some words to Dom about my prognosis and then I dummy up. I communicate the situation to everyone else via text message, and later in person I talk (inefficiently) through a text-to-speech website I’ve got open on my laptop, and we all geek out about how fun it is going to be to have, as Donald puts it, a robot friend. I quickly determine which swear words the computer pronounces well and which ones it mangles. It has a hard time with “dick,” which you would think would be easy.

There is a whole pharmacy snafu which means I can’t get my drugs ‘till the next day and as I’m walking home, a mute man defeated, I let a guy into my building who’s waiting downstairs, buzzing in. He has an aggressive hairstyle and designer jeans where one back pocket is torn away and flapping there to reveal a layer of studs underneath. He does not say thank you when I hold the door open for him. I’m actually sort of grateful because this means I don’t have to say anything back, so I don’t seem weird. He has saved me from seeming rude by being rude. Then I go to check the mail, and when I round the corner from the mail-room, he is holding the elevator door open for me. I nod and smile but I can’t say “Thank you.” Fuck. I am mad at him for being nice. He has unwittingly fucked up the balance of social pleasantry.

I accidentally croak out a few “sures” or “no problems” in the course of the rest of the evening, but other than that I manage to stay silent. Dom orders for me when we go to get dinner. What I can’t communicate through text message or scrawlings in my notebook or exaggerated silent-film gestures, I don’t. It’s actually kind of still and peaceful and fun, to tell you the truth.

Posted by DC at June 26, 2009 05:42 AM