The diagnoses is acute pancreatitis which is weird because
the doctors claim it is mostly found in alcoholics and as of my 18 years on
this planet you have slammed less than maybe thirty consecutive beers. I have
not had anything alcoholic in semblance since I was in Germany six weeks ago on
Easter Sunday and all of your classmates went crazy buying the only kind of
beer that was available in the gas station across the street from your hotel,
the beer that had little consecutive S’s above the nozzle when you opened the
bottle, the beer that tasted like a lactating skunk and everyone in the room
claimed they were getting drunk and peeing off the balcony and stumbling around
until you scrutinized the label and saw what you believed to be the German word
for alcoholic followed by the word Nein and you made a salient point of noting
to your cohorts that this beer is non-alcoholic and that is the reason the
noisome peddler at the gas station seemed to proud to sell it and everyone in
the room sobered up real quick.
It is more than likely a misdiagnosis. There are translucent tubes threaded i to your body.
When you walk to the bathroom to the stalk ferrying your IV follows you in
tandem like the chrome shadow of death. When you wake up in the morning there is a
middle-aged African American nursing assistant who gives you a sponge bath and then hands you
the sponge informing you to attend to your ‘Guy parts.”
You smile.
***
My eyes seem to crack open as if I am hatching from
a strip of black ice. Everything is dotted with tar dolloped with sips of color
and then there is movement accompanied by stuttered wisps of animation. Mom is
telling me that everything is going to be okay and that I had some sort of
flare up and that the doctors are nonplussed as to what precipitated the cause
of such abdominal duress. The gruff almost sentiment sight of my further in his
taupe pants and Rockport shoes is standing next to my mom. A physician comes in
and presses on certain vectors of my lower tummy like he is performing CPR,
inquiring if the pressure points he is pressing down on seemingly inflicts
pain. I close my eyes again and it is night. I body surfed through what I will
look back as being senior year in high school and the last week I will spend in
the grilled sided raft of a hospital bed feeling like some sort of a castaway.
There is a spiraled notebook that I use to chronicle my poems.
The second day Kristina comes back in again after school.
“Hey angel.” I say. She is wearing her dappled blonde skirt that seems to skid to a stop inches beneath her torso. She sits on the lip of the bed and I knot my arms around her waist, kisses the side of her abdomen with an audible mwah. Tell her it feels good. My mom always sways her head into her shoulder blade and smiles audibly when Kristina enters the room, asking her how she is doing, smiling again at her response when Kristina routinely informs my mom that she is doing fine.
Twice Patrick and Strick have come on their own and just sat in the opposite corner of the room, my eyes stuttering into morning cognizance seeing them seated looking out the window at the gnarled and lock of interstate traffic below sipping coffee quietly asking how I am doing.
The doctor enters the room. Kitty Pekowski is still draped in my arms.
“I always get nervous when I see teenage kids in bed together.” Kitty's face transitions into the color of cheap Kool-Aid. My mom looks at me sternly. The Doctor is scrutinizing a slate that from where I am seated looks like offensive football plays, making a circle, delineating what he thinks is wrong.
"It could have been triggered by gall stones." He inquires if I drink a lot of soda. I tell him no. I tell him I slam usually three-to-four pots of coffee a day and that I never sleep and that I stay up all night and write."
"It could have been triggered by gall stones." He inquires if I drink a lot of soda. I tell him no. I tell him I slam usually three-to-four pots of coffee a day and that I never sleep and that I stay up all night and write."
The Doctor looks at me and then looks down as if he is reading a thermometer with his chin.
The Doctor continues blather on about medicinal jargon. Midway through his conjecture of what may of causes my flare-up Kitty stands up and straightens the hem of her dress. Without saying a word she heads to the bathroom located next to my bed, the room where I am escorted with a NA because I am plugged into a piece of intravenous machinery. The door locks in a stolid click and I can hear the marble clank of the horseshoe toilet descending. The next thing I heard is fluid trickling out of Kitty Pekowski. I try not to think about her panties wreathed around the caps of her knees, her dress flapped up like the bruise petal to a tulip. I try not to think about her vagina, releasing itself in a translucent ribbon from her body. The doctor is still looking at the large film negatives from the proceeding earlier in the day stating that my organs look funny. He asks me how often I drink and I honestly tell him that I will be nineteen in six weeks and have maybe had less than an accumulated case of beer in what constitutes my entire life. Inside the bathroom urine is still trickling out of Kitty, tapering off in a Chinese water-torcher tempo. I try not to think about Kitty reeling off a strip of toilet paper and wading it into a carnation and swiping it between the flesh arch of her loins. I try not to think about her snapping her off-white panties back into place, padding the sides of her floral skirt down before flicking the saluting chrome handle into a linoleum whorl.
The doctor continues to be befuddled. He asks if I
have been under a lot of emotional stress with school. I want to tell him about
how it felt like I spent last year under water. How I cried and shook every
morning. How the only IV I had pricked
into the epidermal armor of my physical anatomy was that of the black ink pen I brandished like a
heroin-inflicting needle into spiral
notebooks I chronicled my every solitary thought in metered I deemed to poetic.
When Kristina
steps out of the bathroom. I try not to
look at the center of her body. She sits down on the freshly changed tissue of
the bed and smiles. I kiss her forehead.
“Did you miss me?” Kitty inquires.
***
Later that night, after Kitty has left, I think about what it would have been like if I would have followed he into the bathroom. I think about what she would have done if, while she was seated on the toilet with her skirt flapped up and her panties subtlety twisted below the caps of her knees, I wonder what she would have done if I would have whipped it out, if I would have unearthed the stiff wand of my Y-chromosome. I wonder if she would look at it like a baton. Like a fleshy bouquet, would she have coward, or would she have bitten into me with her nails and ingested me into her lips.
Later in the morning I grapple my tattered copy of on the road. In the center of the book mom has wedged a letter I received in the mail.
It is from Megan.
It is a Hallmark card.
The cover features two kids the size of good year tires dressed up in their grandparents clothing holding the stem of an illuminated rose.
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