Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “Oh, you’re blaming me because I’m your wingman now and was just trying to help you out.” I got up from the couch and strode toward the kitchen. “Let’s try this,” I said. I opened the freezer compartment and found a pair of ice trays. I ejected the cubes into an ice bucket that the good people of Just Inn had provided. Once I’d filled it with water I brought it back to Jack. “Here,” I said. “Stick it in.”

  Jack untied the drawstring on his surgeon’s pants–I elected not to point out the irony of his being already in ER garb–and they collapsed to his ankles. He wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  “Holy shit,” I gasped, getting my first, and I hoped for the rest of my life last, look at the beast. It was huge, thick as a sausage, vein-riddled and crimson from all the blood that had surged there. “That’s a true Louisville Slugger, Jackson. All it needs is the insignia burned in. Bonds could have broken Aaron’s record without ’roids with that thing!”

  “Fuck, man, this is no time for joking. I’m serious.” Jack slowly guided his cock into the bucket of ice. “Jesus, Homes, this is freezing!”

  “Keep it in there like maybe thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes! My dick’ll turn into a fucking Ice Whammy!”

  “No wonder poor Carmen was such a wreck. She could barely walk.”

  “I didn’t want to keep screwing her,” Jack explained, still wincing from the ice bath now enveloping his most sensitive organ. “I was just trying to get the thing to go down.”

  “You think it was fair to her to turn her into a fucking human spittoon to relieve your self-induced malady?”

  “I didn’t know I had anything, asshole. I thought if I could keep coming it would finally go down like it always does. But it didn’t.”

  I started laughing, less at the situation than at his dismayed expression. My laughter grew uncontrollable. It took hold of me as if I were possessed and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, rolling around, tears streaming uninhibitedly down my cheeks.

  “It’s not funny, Homes! It’s not funny.”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. My rib cage was hurting. “Three one-hundred milligrams, dude,” I sputtered between irrepressible laughter. “They probably only gave that high of a dose to chimps in the experimental stages before the FDA approval.” And I collapsed back into hysterical laughter.

  Jack was not amused. His cock was so rigid he had to use the force of his hand to direct it downward into the ice. After a few minutes he pulled it out and it sprang upward like a flowering agave, turgid, twitching with an otherworldly life force I had never before witnessed. “Fuck, it hurts, man. Ice ain’t doing shit for it.”

  My laughter finally subsided and I straightened to a standing position. “Put that thing away. It’s only three hours to Fresno and we got to get my mom to a dentist because her tooth is getting worse. While there we’ll get you to a doctor. Hopefully, it will have gone down by then.” Jack pulled up his pants but the bulge was shockingly blatant. He looked like a teenager ducking into a whorehouse. “What does it feel like?”

  “Like the Space Shuttle with all the rockets fired but secured to the scaffolding that won’t release.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a metaphorist, Jackson. Beautiful trope.”

  “Fuck you. Let’s get to Fresno.” “Sure you don’t want to duck into the bathroom and try to whack it off one more time?”

  “Jesus, Miles. Stop joking. I’ve got a medical emergency here,” he said in a pained voice emitted from an even more pained-looking face.

  “All right. I’m sure the doctors will know what to do. If they have to slit the helmet, they have to slit the helmet.”

  “Don’t say that, Miles, do not say that. Fucking image has me freaked out.”

  “Carmen must have thought you were the greatest middle-aged lover on the planet.”

  “Chick hadn’t been laid in a year. The last two I had to lube her she was so dry.”

  “You know, I would have thought this would have been your dream: a perpetual hard-on.”

  “It’s not funny, Miles. It’s not funny.”

  “All right, we’ve got to make tracks. Go back to your room and pack. Take some Aspirin. Give the Louisville another ten in the ice bucket and we’ll come down and get you, all right?”

  “All right,” he said. He turned around clumsily, holding his massive erection with both hands as if he had been kicked in the groin by a black belt in karate, and tottered out the door.

  I packed and then walked the short distance over the gravel pathway to the Tuscany suite to check on my mom, still bummed about Laura’s leaving, still battling a hangover, three Motrins not doing shit for my sledgehammer-pounding headache, and now facing two potential medical emergencies. When I came in I found her stationed in the center of the room, slumped in her wheelchair, her elbows on the armrests. Joy was sitting on the couch reading a trashy entertainment magazine. I approached my mother, who wore a sullen expression. The right side of her lower jaw was visibly swollen. She was fingering it as if testing it, hoping that it might go away of its own volition.

  With a look of concern, I said, “We’re going to get you to a dentist in Fresno, Mom. Okay?”

  “No,” she barked. “They’ll want to hospitalize me.”

  “For an infected molar?”

  “Everything has to be done in a hospital,” she wailed.

  “Why?”

  “Because of all the medications I’m on.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that.” I stood and addressed Joy. I rooted the car keys out of my pocket and handed them to her. “Get packed up and get my mom in the van and I’ll go gather up Jack.”

  She set her magazine aside, rose from the couch and accepted the keys. “Okay. We’re all packed.”

  I don’t know if it was the wine, the pressure of now having two injured parties on the road or what, but I came toward her and enveloped her in my arms. “I really appreciate everything you’re doing, Joy. You’re a champ.” I released her quickly so she wouldn’t misinterpret my gesture.

  She giggled. The marijuana aroma haloed her face. I didn’t disclose Jack’s affliction. I doubted they, being women, would want to hear about permanently turgid penises and an explanation of the rare condition known as priapism.

  I went over to the Provençal suite to check up on Jack. He was sitting on the couch, his colossal erection plunged into an ice bucket he had fashioned from the bathroom wastebasket. I tried not to laugh. He looked over at me and shook his head grimly. I placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “How’s it going? Any improvement?”

  “Fuck, man. It hurts.” He pulled his cock out of the ice bath. It was now a reddish-blue from the cold water immersion. When he let go of it it sprang to the ceiling like a startled bullfrog leaping off a rock.

  “Jesus Christ, Jackson,” I said empathetically. He looked at me with his face pinched in pain. I squeezed his shoulder. “We’re going to take care of it in Fresno. Fresno is going to be our city of Lourdes!”

  “They’re not going to slit my helmet, are they?” he said, tears springing to his eyes.

  “No, man. They got fucking meds for this. With all the Viag and Cialis out there, this has got to be like LSD meltdowns in the ‘60s. Come on, get dressed, get packed up, let’s blow this winery.”

  Jack, still clutching his priapic member, joined us in the van. He had a half bottle of wine with him and a full pour in a plastic cup. He tilted the bottle but I waved him off. “Obviously, I’m going to be doing the driving today, and I’ve already had a little bit this morning,” I said in a lowered voice so my mother wouldn’t hear.

  I gave a backward glance toward her. She was massaging the right side of her jaw. I turned away, started the car and drove along the gravel driveway and braked to a stop at the reception building. Inside, I asked for the PR person who was summoned by the young girl at the front desk. She came out a moment later, all smiles.

  “You were great last night, Miles. Thank you for coming
. Anytime you want to stay with us, just give me a call, okay?” she offered, slipping me a business card.

  “I will, I promise. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  We drove down the winding, oak-shaded single-lane road in the direction of Paso Robles. We connected onto the 46-East at the 101 cloverleaf and started on the Fresno leg of our journey. When my mother learned that we were heading to Oregon she requested a detour to visit her brother Bud, whom she hadn’t seen in years. Jack had had no beef with it then, but now that he was in pain, the extra stop caused him to grouse.

  “Do we really have to stop to see your mother’s brother?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s probably going to be the last time she sees him.”

  “That’s one butt-ugly drive, and one depressing city.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  From the 46 we connected to the 41, a two-lane rural highway. We passed through postage stamp-sized towns with eccentric names like Shandon and Reef Station. My mother, on a potent dose of diuretics, had to go to the bathroom frequently. Each stop, Jack and I would hang back as Joy wheeled her into a convenience store bathroom so she could do her business. While she did, Joy would always pop back outside and take a few hits from her half-smoked blunt. Jack was still in pain, the erection wasn’t ebbing, and I think he was starting to grow anxious about seeing a doctor to get it taken care of.

  “Is the wine helping?” I ventured.

  “A little,” he said. He glanced over at Joy who averted her gaze. “Maybe I need some med Mary.”

  “Don’t mix wine and pot,” I advised, “you’ll get the spins.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Then, his thoughts turning to me, he observed, “You seem a little down.”

  “Yeah, I was bummed when Laura left.”

  “You kind of fell for her, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “There’ll be way more in the Willamette.”

  I turned to him and said. “Right now, for some reason, that’s not a consolation.”

  “Sorry.” He looked away. “You really did fall hard for her. I haven’t seen you like this since the Maya period.”

  I stared straight out the front windshield at the desolate road ahead, nodding noncommittally in response.

  We got off Highway 41 at the I-5 junction in Kettleman City, a barren, depressing way station with a population under 1,500. We stopped for lunch at a joint called Mike’s Roadhouse Café only because it looked a cut above the fast-food franchises that defaced the dilapidated town. The exterior was done in a kind of Western-style with an A-framed, wood-shingled roof. One could almost picture horses hitched to the wood-slatted fence in front a hundred years ago. The food was pedestrian, but my mother was not an epicure and she dug into her grilled cheese with relish. Any food consumed outside Las Villas de Muerte was haute cuisine to her! When she slyly tried to order a glass of the house plonk Chardonnay I nixed it and she grew sullen.

  “Mom, we’ve got to get you to a dentist in Fresno and I don’t want you stinking of wine.”

  “Oh, don’t make fun of me,” she said. “Can I have a glass, please?” she tried to wheedle.

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “And I didn’t burn the house down because I was drunk.”

  “Okay, Mom, okay. I embellished it a little for comic effect. I’m a writer. I do things like that. I’m sorry.”

  After the dispiriting lunch, we piled back into the Rampvan, crossed the I-5 and arced onto the 198, a four-lane highway that aimed us due north in the direction of Fresno. This being the middle of July, the heat was oppressive. The AC on the Rampvan blasted us mercifully with cold air while we were driving, but every time we had to make a pit-stop for my almost incontinent mother and stepped outside the air was scorching, Saharan hot. The temperature gauge on the GPS read 101 degrees, only further exacerbating Jack’s irascibility–Fresno, his unabated erection, and my insistence that he ease back on the wine and shift over to mineral water. Nothing was assuaging his mood. Worse, his groin looked like he was trying to smuggle a small exotic animal through Customs.

  We forged on. The passing landscape was hideous. Sere farmland and open stretches of desiccated countryside, where only the hardiest of plants survived and reptiles flourished, fled past in an apocalyptic diorama. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Laura out of my mind.

  In the small town of Lemoore we stopped for an umpteenth bathroom break. I let Jack take the wheel as I got on my iPhone to scope out dentists in Fresno. The plan was to get my mother’s tooth extracted, get Jack into a clinic somewhere that treated priapism, check into the Marriott–where I had in my foresight booked a reservation via Internet–visit my mom’s brother in the morning and then continue north.

  As Jack drove, pushing the needle to 75 so we could make our milestones, I got on the phone to 1-800-DENTIST. After a series of attempts involving mostly electronic call directors and numerical options I got the names and numbers for a few dentists in the greater Fresno area. The first was leaving the office early and couldn’t take my mom, his golf game at some private country club overriding an elderly woman’s dental emergency. The office manager at the second place was affable until I informed her that my mother was a stroke victim with total left-side paralysis and would probably have to be worked on in her wheelchair. The line went silent.

  “Hello, are you there?”

  “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “I was checking with the doctor. He says he’s real sorry, but he doesn’t, um, work on, um, handicapped patients.”

  “I see,” I said, the various mounting crises, not to mention my own depression, starting to make me come unglued. “I understand. That’s cool. Thanks. And please tell the doctor next time I’m in Fresno with my civil rights attorney girlfriend who specializes in ADA litigation, I’m going to FUCKING OWN HIS PRACTICE!” I punched the phone off in anger, my frustration exacerbated by my hangover, the desolate landscape and the creeping presentiment that we weren’t going to make the IPNC in time. I motored down my window and hung my head out for a second to catch some fresh air, to see if that would change my perspective on everything. It didn’t. Joy looked tired from another sleepless night. Jack sat in quiet agony, surgery scenarios no doubt making him shudder. My mother stoically nursed her inflamed molar, and I was still mourning the loss of a woman whom Jack had rightly surmised I had fallen for. Only Snapper seemed to have come out of the Justin leg medically and psychologically unscathed. The air was still restaurant-kitchen hot and it practically peeled off a layer of skin. And it was only 11:30 a.m.! I gunned the window back up in response to protestations from the rear.

  I turned around and looked at my mother. “How’s the tooth, Mom? Does it hurt badly?”

  “Comes and goes,” she muttered.

  “That’s what my last girlfriend said about me.”

  Joy pistoned a fist to her mouth and giggled spontaneously. My murderous sense of humor was having, I discerned, a nice little effect on her. I also noticed that she had unbuttoned the top two buttons of her white sleeveless blouse, revealing the fact she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her dark-red nipples could be seen clearly through the diaphanous material. I had to look away, a woman’s naked body not what I needed to be visualizing just then.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother croaked after eavesdropping on another failed attempt to line up a dentist who would take her. “Won’t anyone see me?”

  “I’m working on it, Mom, I’m working on it.” I turned to Jack. “What’s coming up next, Captain?”

  Jack glanced at the GPS and said, “Caruthers. Another fifty long, motherfucking miles.”

  “Caruthers! Jesus. They probably don’t have dentists there, just let their teeth rot. Anyway, let’s make a pit-stop there, I need a cold beer or something to take the edge off.”

  “I hear you, brother, I hear you.”

  I phoned the final dentist on my list, a Dr. Wen-Jen Yang. When I told Dr. Yang’s receptionist I was tra
veling with my mother and that she had what appeared to be an abscessed tooth, the initial response was very concerned and sympathetic. I decided not to go into the patient’s other infirmities, hoping for as welcoming a reception. And I was confident of getting it, booking an appointment for two o’clock, the dentist generously giving up his lunch date to make room for my ailing mother. Ecstatic, I swiveled between the two front seats and said, “We’re in, Mom.”

  Her face brightened. “Oh, that’s such good news.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal: He’s a local barber, but he does tooth extractions in the back of his shop.”

  “Oh, no,” my mom said, chuckling. Joy looked out the window, smiling a laugh, avoiding my gaze.

  “I’m just kidding you, Mom. He’s a real dentist. We’re going to take care of that tooth.”

  On the outskirts of the tiny town of Caruthers we came upon the burnt-out shell of a FedEx tractor-trailer lying on its side, an automotive leviathan annihilated by a meteor. Framing the bleak foreground image of charred wreckage was the bleak countryside, which seemed to spread to some infernal infinity.

  We pulled into a gas station/minimart. Joy once again dutifully wheeled my mother into the bathroom. Thank God for Joy, I thought, patient and kind with my paralyzed mother. Jack and I went inside the refrigerated sanctuary of the minimart and bought a quart of Sierra Nevada Ale. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but the intense heat of this Central Valley agricultural hellhole made the heavier alcoholic effects of wine less agreeable, though I had stowed a couple of bottles of white Burgundy in the cooler, replenished with all new ice.

  Jack and I were sitting up front, discreetly sipping the cold ale in our plastic cups, waiting to go, when Joy returned with my mother. I opened the door and leapt out to help Joy, whom I was starting to worry about in terms of going the distance. It was hard work being with my mother 24/7 and I sensed she needed relief from time to time. “I’ll take her,” I said.

  With her index and middle fingers fused, she tapped her lips several times.

  “That’s cool,” I said. “Spark up.”