“You worry too much,” says Georgina. “Worry wart! Next you’ll be getting Herpes.” Georgina is laughing.
“Very funny,” I say. “Right now I’d be more worried about this pain in my lower right quadrant. I think I have a fever.”
“Show me where it hurts,” she says, unzipping my pants as I’m driving.
I pull over. She does the rebound test for Peritonitis, the way I taught her on our first night together. Nothing.
“Probably just a gas bubble,” she says, hiking up her skirt and getting comfy.
*
Georgina lasted three weeks. She accused me of having pre-menstrual syndrome. That son of hers, Ronald, definitely has psychological problems—he called me a basket case. And I’m still recovering from the blow Curtis landed as they were leaving.
“There’s a strong possibility I may be bleeding internally,” I call as they head towards the waiting taxi.
“Porter Jones,” Georgina shrieks from the sidewalk, “you don’t need a true love, you need a fleet of ambulance attendants.”
Fortunately, as a welfare worker, I am eligible for stress leave at three-quarters of my regular pay. I hate to admit to failing emotions but it’s the only way I can get off work to administer to my swollen liver. My doctor has refused to see me. The things I could say about the medical profession.
*
Before long a person called Wanda follows me home from the health food store.
When I finally speak to her, as a test, I say, “I have this pain.”
“People with pain almost always have something wrong in the body,” she says and I am ecstatic. I know I have made a match. Wanda clinches it when she says, “I can always tell a victim of Twentieth-Century Disease. You need me.”
“Okay,” I say. And so to bed.
*
Wanda is an old hippie: long flowering skirt, hairy legs, several pounds of beads hanging off her neck. She has taken to preparing herbal remedies for me, teas, poultices. She gathers the herbs from her own garden and administers them to me while chanting and nodding her head towards the eastern sky, her long grey hair falling over her unhinged breasts. And furthermore, she is an excellent masseuse.
“Doctors are rip-off artists,” she says.
True. True. True.
We are like-minded, Wanda and I. The things she says about the medical profession. For instance: how come, how come and how come?
How come we can land a man on the moon and we haven’t yet found a cure for Agoraphobia?
How come doctors play so much golf while all over the world people are starving for adequate recreational facilities?
How come doctors get all the money while lay people like me are having to shop at the Nearly New and make a cult out of getting by with less?
She also says, “Doctors don’t know dick. Anybody can see you’re allergic to everything.”
To this end Wanda has removed every piece of synthetic material from my house. This activity hasn’t left me with much. The TV, my dishes, the kitchen table and chairs, my Dacron wall-to-wall, even the plastic toilet roll holder. All sit in a pile on the front lawn. The shower curtain. A windfall for the Sally Ann.
Not only that but she has painted the interior of my house Maalox-white, using lead-free paint. White walls, white ceilings, white floors. My house looks like the inside of a laboratory. I sleep on a white cotton futon; Wanda allows white cotton pyjamas. She vacuums dust from her naked self before visiting me from the custodial tent outside; she monitors my condition twenty-four hours a day.
She brings me cauliflower soup, the cauliflower hand-grown in the finest organic soil.
“Mineral deposits found in cauliflower are effective in treating advanced cancer of the colon,” she assures me. Every day the cauliflower cure.
I spend my days wandering through the bare room in an orgy of illness. I’ve never felt better in my life.
*
Before long, Wanda sets up a roadside stand and is charging admission.
“Opportunity knocks,” she says. “The doctors aren’t the only ones to make hay out of gas.”
She has called me the Bubble-Man. Sightseers now file through the flower beds and peer in at me through my curtainless, living room window. I bask in the attention, their awe-filled eyes caressing me like benevolent heat lamps. Judging from the crowds, Wanda is making a killing.
Lately she tells me that Bubble-Man T-shirts are selling like crazy. She says she is about to become President of Bubble-Man Industries, manufacturers of disease memorabilia: stool samples, vials of blood, plastic throat swabs.
“Okay,” I say, “but can you tell me why I am dying? I have this pain.”
“In the neck?” Wanda asks.
“All over.”
“Well keep it,” she says, “that pain has corporate significance.”
“All right,” I say, “but get me some ginger ale and some Vick’s cough drops, cherry-flavoured. And fix my pillow and rub my back and bring me some magazines and bring me the thermometer. I need all the care I can get and don’t you forget it.”
“Not on your life,” Wanda says.
*
All the sightseers are wearing white cotton pyjamas. Television networks are plaguing us for prime-time interviews: Bubble-Man has suddenly become an important news item and we are getting offers to do commercial endorsements.
Now everyone I have ever known is gawking at me through the living room window. In envy. Covetousness. Isobel and all her relations. Cousins I never knew I had. Former co-workers. The entire staff from the Department of Welfare. Georgina, Ronald, Curtis, their neighbours from the housing project. No one is immune. All gaze in wonder, mouthing at me through the living room window: “We never knew you’d be famous, Porter Jones. We never knew you’d be a person of importance.”
Fulfillment on their faces. Tears in their eyes.
My head is spinning. I allow members of fundamentalist religious organizations to touch the hem of my pyjamas. Cripples and maniacs sit reverentially outside my window. For hours.
*
But then suddenly the doctors descend. Swarms of them are pouring over my body, taking tests, peering in my orifices. “Wanda, Wanda, this wasn’t in the plan. You said doctors are the plague of the earth!”
But Wanda’s nonplussed. “Things change,” she says. “And studies show that businesses which use consultants wisely are more likely to flourish than those which do not. You have to be sensitive to market forces if you want to survive.”
So I am charitable to the doctors, serene in my national sickness, swollen with illness-identity. I’ll be a good business investment for Wanda. “A barium enema? No problem. Suck on this little metal tube? Delighted.”
But when the doctors finish testing me they ponder: how come, how come and how come?
How come Porter Jones has all this attention?
How come he is lying bloated with gas on a cotton futon and is not in one of our technologically advanced medical centres?
How come a businesswoman-hippie has control of this amazing new gimmick when there are research foundations to vie for, new medical centres to be had?
The doctors buy out Wanda’s interest in Bubble-Man Industries and move me to a specially sterilized Bubble-Room at their Centre.
Wanda is pleased with the settlement. “Buy low, sell high,” she says as she’s leaving. “Besides, I’m onto something. There’s this guy, paralyzed from the waist down from eating Aspartame. He needs me.”
*
My bubble has burst. After six weeks of further testing at the Centre, the doctors can find nothing wrong with me. As well, interest in me is waning; the polls show that VCRs are turning family television viewing into video campfire gatherings. This means that I am no longer being watched—I have achieved viewer saturation. My ability to command the public’s attention is no longer significant.
My removal from the medical centre happened this way. I was spending my brief but halcyon days there, as
usual, nursing one of my invisible, lurking tumours, or else giving interviews through the Plexiglas of my Bubble-Room when a workman burst through the door and began stripping the Saran Wrap from the walls.
“What are you doing?” I gasped. “Don’t you know I’m the Bubble-Man. I have Twentieth-Century Disease. I’m allergic to EVERYTHING?”
“Got orders to re-do this room, Mac,” was all he would tell me.
Within hours the Bubble-Room had been transformed to resemble the inside of a church: altar, font, cross, stained glass windows. Six hospital beds were done over to look like pews. Three nuns, three priests, all dressed in deathly black, prepared to take up residence.
“Electromagnetic clatter from millions of man-made sources is drowning out the whispers from heaven,” they explained. “We’re donating ourselves to medical science. Research. Soul transplants. That sort of thing. Please make way for the cameras.”
In desperation I called up Georgina. “I’m being turfed out,” I wailed, “thrown back to the polluting forces, my only possessions, the white pyjamas on my back, my portable heart monitor. How come, how come and how come?”
*
Today I have Diverticulitis. Yesterday it was Scabies. Last week, gritty deposits on my tibia. It’s incredible the way I go on living.
I have moved in with Georgina; Isobel got the house in our divorce settlement. Because of my many illnesses I am totally unable to work. Fortunately my union at the welfare office provides me with a life-long disability pension at fifty percent of my regular wage. With the money Georgina makes as a welfare recipient, we get by pretty well, especially since we sent her kids to a group home—all those pre-adolescent hormones were giving me migraines.
It took a while to adjust to life post-Bubble but I am now, once again, at home with plague, virus and allergic reaction. Still, I am always on the lookout for a new disease which will explain my condition. Unfortunately there is not a doctor in the country who will see me.
Lately I have been troubled with Narcolepsy. I am liable to keel over in mid-sentence. It’s like dropping dead, only I fall asleep instead. Nevertheless, I was able to get Georgina pregnant. I can’t remember when I did this but she assures me that I am the father and not that ambulance attendant, Arnold, who is always hanging around. “For one last autograph,” he winks as I plunge to the ground.
But I have fond thoughts for the child. Maybe if I can hold out through the deterioration of my sight, hearing and appetite which I know is in store for me, and the incontinence and the mental disturbance, as well. Maybe if I am still alive when the child is old enough to realize that studies show/experts say that he was born to die, that living is just a series of unexplained, uncomfortable medical conditions, occurring one after the other, sometimes all at once, perhaps then I will show him my scrapbook. Pages and pages of newspaper clippings from my Bubble-Man days, boxes full of disease souvenirs: the T-shirts and white pyjamas. It may be a distinct advantage for him to go through life with a once-famous father. On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn’t influence him unduly—he’ll have his own diseases to discover.
THE COMMA THREAT
I’m using up all my commas. I have a box of them sitting on my desk and I’m using them up. Well, I’ve given them away, as well. I gave some to my aunt to decorate her curtains; she flung handfuls of them against her drapes hoping for a Jackson Pollock effect. My son used one hundred and fifty of them for his science project on “The Way Rain Falls,” using them like nails to tack down his subject. (I hated to deny him, though his use savaged my supply.) Then my mother-in-law asked to borrow at least twenty because she wanted to lengthen some sentences she was using in her Bridge game. There were some nifty bids she had in mind for her partner, she said, involving spades and top boards. She thought they’d have a real advantage if she added some commas, throwing off the competition who speak only in single words, such as “Pass” and “Hearts.” And how could I say “no” to my mother-in-law who regularly lets me use her semi-colons?
But commas—those strong enough to withstand the rigours of fiction—are hard to come by. This is my problem: where to find a reliable supply. My neighbour picks up the odd bag-full for me from where she works at the school. She finds the commas fallen from text books and lying on the floor or blown in drifts beneath the blackboards. Old commas. They are from the time of ancient civilizations, from the Social Studies books, but they are prone to cracking. You put them in your sentence and before you know it, they have fallen off and a heap of them have collected at the bottom of the page. Commas from Social Studies books will just not stick so I’ve given up on them.
The same can be said of libraries. The whole world knows that libraries are comma-museums, the place where millions of commas have their final resting place. Just go to the section that houses ninteenth-century literature and you will be awash in commas. But, again, these are old, breakable commas and of little value. You could remove them by the wheelbarrow-full and no-one would care. In fact, you’d be doing the library staff a favour; already they are knee deep in the commas that regularly fall from the pages of Thackery and Henry James. It’s appalling to realize what librarians must wade through in order to perform their book-tending duties.
The best commas come from letters of resignation, letters of termination, but these are private commas and difficult to get hold of. Still, they are likely to have the most effect in a piece because they are a substantial, finalizing sort of comma, very black in colour, and they never crack. They’re the lignum vitae of commas, strong, and much prized if they can be found. They add a certain bleak seriousness to a piece, something I regularly covet. These commas are solid but insidious, like ticks, those burrowing ticks picked up on forest walks. The only way to get them out is to turn them slowly, counter-clockwise.
But don’t tell a reader that. You start having a reader remove commas from your piece and before you know it, your words will be smashed up against each other. Panic overtakes first one sentence, then another, and then they all start rushing for the exit. The effect is domino: herds of sentences running amok through your book. Punctuation is slaughtered. It’s really awful to see—all those commas strewn in the margins, leaking from the spines of books. It can have a negative effect on periods, too: it really shatters their sense of solidity. Capital letters automatically get scared and shrink. And exclamation marks! It’s shocking to discover how really spineless they are. Exclamation marks will jump up and run at the slightest whiff of comma-threat; you’ll find them huddled together on the back cover by the barcode. They just cannot hold their own in a sea of fluid words.
So the whole text is in jeopardy if a reader starts messing with the commas. Before you know it the sentences will have congealed into a large, black, amorphous mass and a void is created. And if you didn’t realize it before now, this is how voids are created—by removing commas from a piece of fiction. Try removing the commas from this piece and see what happens. I won’t be responsible, though, if you sink beneath the ands and thes, if you get trampled by the sudden, explosive rhythm that is unleashed, if you lose your way. Your cries for help won’t be heard above the shrieks of quotation marks begging to be saved.
No, it’s better if you leave the commas alone. They have a calming effect on a piece. Understand that commas are prized because they are a friend of time, slowing down the catapult, reining in the breathless. Use them decoratively,,,,,,,,,as in this sentence,,,,,,,or use them sparingly. Too many commas in a piece can cause tripping, too few, an unnecessary strain on the heart. Balance must be achieved between word-intake, contemplation, and the always-hoped-for fireworks display in the reader’s mind. Commas do this by slowing down the universe just long enough for the light to shine through; they are little warriors hammering away at chaos.
And now their existence is threatened. It all started with Gertrude Stein who was not impressed with commas and felt that if you’re going to pause with a thought you might just as well end it. Written advertising pi
cked up this theme, as did the minimalists with their sleek, exquisite sentences. But, in doing so, commas were lost and, over a scant fifty-year period, the supply of good quality commas has dwindled. Sure, there are still plenty of commas around. Look in any book that specializes in adjectives, in descriptions of coastal villages, barns, and the like. But these commas are a dime a dozen, flimsy, insubstantial commas. Digest commas, temporary commas. They don’t stick. Not on the page. Not in the mind. Not anywhere.
Occasionally I’ve gotten a small number of commas from modernist texts. They’re scant but thoughtfully placed. And because they’re fairly new, they maintain their shine and can really dignify a piece. But it’s hard work retrieving modernist commas, like chipping paint from a window sill. You need a small chisel with a fine point, a pair of tweezers (or medical forceps) and a steady hand. It’s time-consuming work, very often resulting in ripped pages. And some of those modernist commas will not budge, especially the cocky Hemingway commas which tend to fight to the death to stay on the page; you really need a washerwoman’s strength to remove them. I have a set of twelve Hemingway trophy-commas which I’m saving for a special occasion. Each one is wrapped carefully in white tissue paper and set in two rows inside a black, velvet-lined case. Their procurement was the result of years of trial and error to discover the right attitude before the page: a bottle of Pernod, a canvas writing outfit, a rugged aloneness. “Comma to Momma,” I might have said; it was amazing the way they surrendered.
But the supply problem persists. In fact, I’ve just used my last comma in this sentence after the word fact and you know what will happen now because already the periods are getting restless already the quotation marks are breathing heavy the whimpers from the text can almost be heard and it s too late to use those commas I so recklessly splashed about earlier in this piece the ones I wasted talking about comma decoration how foolish how insane to squander commas like that and now the whole text threatens to melt like jelly down a drain so do me a favour will you i ve just lost the question marks and capital letters do me a favour and send me any good quality commas you may have in your possession i don t care if they re used it doesn t matter if they re broken even half a comma would help but please before these words completely overtake me please send what ever you have my mind is going slack i beg you the words are in revolt send more commas these words won t behave they re forgetting where to place themselves and now they re runningforthehillslike
Down the Road to Eternity Page 6
