THE S CLUB
Chapter 23

CHRISTMAS l99l

I am like a half-broken intercom, I can receive but I cannot transmit, that is I can just barely talk but I can still decipher. My infant open eyes absorb and understand, but there is nothing I can do with the information coming in. Sometimes I can muster a laugh but when I do it tears and tickles the ravaged insides of my lungs and then I am aware of the rump-de-dump of my heart and there is a silence for my body is an ossified system of appendages. My yellow perspiring skin is a rhapsody of raspberry legions. I have to coordination and am as helpless as new born.

I sit on my wheel chair in the listless beige breeze. I think. And like the palm fronds overhead, my head bobs in this moneyed and hopeless world and finally my head will bob and bend and break into the inevitable.

Hippies had the summer of love, swingers had the pill, and faggots, well, we were never scared of getting pregnant either. Yes, Faggotus Unitis bow to Prometheus bringing the fire to earth landing right smack at Rockefeller Center in his Art Deco fall from grace. A few blocks from Studio 54 and the Adonis, the alleyways and the falsehoods, to experiment with youth’s then supple body and mind into sexually strung peccadilloes to the netherworld of the sexual you inside you. The soul of the Amyl Nitrate to synapse your synapses of the forehead of your foreskin to deep and murky regions of your pubic and sexual lagoon.

My arm is as reedy as undernourished, my veins protruding to the plastic blue insert to the clear tube dripping this afternoon’s solution versed in keeping me sustained.

“Eddie,” called Joyce holding her baby. “Would you like to be wheeled in front of the set? It is going to be on in just a few minutes.”

My eyes glistened yes.

Joyce put the baby in her crib and came out to the terrace. Joyce is Madge’s lover and they just recently had a baby. A lot of girls are doing that now. They find a man who is HIV negative. They have him sign a contract saying that he will have nothing to do with the newborn, next, he jerks off into a turkey buster, and then Madge inserts the turkey baster into Joyce. Nine months later, Joyce gives birth to bouncy baby lesbian. Whom they have named Forrest.

I have yet to have even held Forrest not because I could give the baby anything but they are afraid the baby could give me one of her infant diseases, say collick and then that might put me over the top.

Madge now has yet another great job in television, this time it is with Fox. We live in an Italian villa in the Hollywood Hills that on clear days we can see from the Beverly Center to the ocean. The ocean is very rarely blue instead from a distance it is a like a windshield that picks up the sun’s glare.

When I first got really sick, Madge invited me out to come out and die with them. We had just buried Katherine who had died of cancer. This was something; Katherine regrettably, had been working on for years. After Randolph died, Katherine had a cigarette and liquor free-for-all. In the morning, she would read the paper and drink coffee. By noon she would be her ironic sweet (or else) bitter self, but, by three thirty on; she would be vindictive or maudlin.

She made a profession out of complaining about old age and loneliness but was so irascible, one had no other recourse but to leave her alone. But then other times, there were those gin rummy games that ran late into the night, in which she would knock first and call her hand way before the game had reached a full flush. The first time, I let it slide by. The second time, I commented that this ploy was a cheap Irish trick. The third time she did it, I called her a name I had shocked myself and she was as well. I said, “Why in God’s name do you knock so early?” And she replied, “To get you by balls, Eddie.” At which we both exploded with eighty-proof laughter and were red cheeked and grinning like jolly Toby Mugs.

I am glad that she is not seeing me like this. Now when I play Gin Rummy with Madge, I have to have her look at my cards to see if I am doing it right.

When someone calls up to see how I am doing or actually dying. They can’t believe how my voice has changed and how pronounced my breathing has become so now they hear how hard it is for me to get any words out. And I imagine that on the phone the effect must resonate and be even to more disturbing, in which case, some people blurt out “I hope you realize how much I love you.” But for the most part, most people only come as close as the phone. As painful as it is to hear, it is equally as painful to see. But nothing is more painful than living.

Simple everyday tasks such as eating, crapping, pissing, bathing, walking, sitting up, even turning over in bed now have become gargantuan and tedious perils.

“Sweetheart, it promises to be really good today, the victim is taking the witness stand, “she said wheeling me around past the pool up the ramp to the den. The television sits there blank eyed and bovine.

“Would you like any oxygen?” she said. “And in a few minutes, it is time for your noon-time medications,” she smiled so sweet and so Mid West. The hospital issued the drugs and assigned them a number, they also gave me a grid like chart that depicts the time and the combination of drugs in which to take them. In a way, it looks like a bookie’s

board.

Sometimes I feel like some devious science experiment, when I almost died last month, my scrotum swelled up and they used lasers to burn off the legions and my legs looking like I had Dutch Elm Disease. But they pumped me so full of drugs and intensified the Chemotherapy, to prolong my life. Life is so precious and so exasperating.

For the invalid, l99l has been a banner year because all you can really do is watch television. The Gulf War, The Russian Coupe, Anita Hill has been able to make your dying process much more livable. And now with William Kennedy Smith, I really have something to live for.

“You were asleep last night when Madge started mouthing off on how CNN has really trashed all the network’s ratings,” said Joyce with a gentle laugh. “I couldn’t take it much longer, she was upsetting Forrest and me. Well, I just sent her outside, to sit by the pool to chill out with a cigar and a Sharps.”

Joyce wonders at time where the peace can be found.

I look at Joyce: leave me out here for a moment. Let me ponder. Let me think. Let me think of the ocean.

I smile. She leaves.

I am alone thinking of the ocean and now I die.

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