hi guys
context and a real live short story
Sorry for being so gone from this platform. I started grad school and haven’t had much capacity for anything else. I’m getting an MS from Columbia in Narrative Medicine.
‘Kay, why are you doing that!’ you might be thinking, to which I would reply
‘I don’t know, that’s none of my business!’
‘Kay, don’t you have an 8th grade science education? And isn’t that institution extremely problematic?? What do you stand for??’
First of all, how do you know that, and second of all yeah that is totally fair, I wasn’t even going to go after I was admitted. But the actual program I am participating in is largely geared toward combating medical racism, and dismantling the insurance industry, and lands squarely on the extremely small side of medical efforts in this country that are interested in legitimately helping people, and making help accessible and less generally traumatizing. So yeah, eventually I decided to go.
Narrative Medicine is a program devoted to restructuring the way accounts of illness and disability are received in the clinical space, rooted in the premise that better readers make better doctors. That is honestly a pretty good and succinct explanation and those are hard to come by, believe me, I’ve asked like a million people.
Basically what I want do, with my art, with my writing (and how mortifying to admit I want to do anything) is try to talk about the body, or to the body, or with the body, for the body? at the body?
Anyways like I said, the distribution of my efforts has been pretty radically reoriented as a result. I’ve been writing a lot of fiction which, if you are familiar with my writing, is not my comfort zone by any stretch.
Here is a short story I wrote:
“I think you’re lying.”
It’s freezing outside. It’s not freezing, because it did rain and the rain wasn’t snow, and when it’s freezing outside rain becomes snow.
But I am so cold that my balls are tight and tiny like grapes and the snot at the edges of my nostrils feels like ice.
“I think you’re lying and that you never did that. And that’s bitchmade to lie dude, that’s gay.”
“I’m not gay, you’re gay”
“Your moms gay.”
I might be gay. It’s freezing. I’m not lying. I mean, I am lying about it being freezing because like I said, it rained, and I am lying about being gay or more precisely I’m lying about being not gay, but I’m not lying about that I Did Do That.
“Dude, everyone is, like, mad at you.”
“Dude, stop, I hate that.”
“I’m serious, everyone is talking about it dude.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Like everyone, like teachers and doctors and stuff.”
“You’ve never met a doctor in your fucking life.”
“Yes I have, when I broke my arm at camp, you fucking bitch.” Evan said, stubbing a sneaker toe into the seam of cold earth splitting the concrete at my feet.
I’m not gay because I’m not anything. I’m not anything and I’m not anyone and the only thing I am is a ghost, but not even like a TV ghost with a score to settle, or a wrong to right, or something to avenge. I’m just like a regular guy’s ghost, like some guy who didn’t have any kids, who died from a heart attack, maybe while drinking water, like Dasani or something.
I crouched down against the sloping cement wall and took some thoughts for a test run.
I thought about kissing Evan, who stood above me in this stupid concrete drainage ditch that feels like a giant gutter that empties into a toilet.
It actually empties out into Big Let Down River. It’s really called that. It’s slow and brown and almost nothing lives in it. About 4 small towns and one big city past my town, it empties out into the Pacific, in a state park called Cape Let Down. Two rivers, one big and one small, dump into Cape Let Down, which is called that because it’s where the Columbia River Gorge lets down into the sea.
I live on the Big One, Big Let Down River, at its widest, shallowest, point.
Evan is my best friend. I didn’t know that until my moms sister came to stay with me for a week, because after my mom and Tim broke up my mom had some ‘things she needed to work through’ and I guess couldn’t do that in Big Let Down. My mom was telling Iodine the rules and basically they were just: no smoking inside the house and that I had to drink milk and that I could go do whatever I wanted for the most part, if Evan His Best Friend went with me.
My moms sister is named Diane. It’s so dumb how stupid baby shit ends up haunting you for your whole damn life like not being able to say Aunt or Diane.
Evan definitely isn’t gay. Evan jerks it all the time to girls and talks about it all the time. He’s always seeing, like, how many times a day he can do it or how fast he can do it. Like if he can jerk off in the amount of time it takes for one of his brothers to go outside and smoke a joint even if he isn’t horny, just for the challenge of it, stuff like that. Hard too I bet because Evan doesn’t even have his own room, although I guess that’s probably how he ended up so damn good at it.
I don’t really like thinking about it and I hate when he tells me about it, which is basically all the time. But just to test, I thought about kissing him and how his lips, tinged orange from the Sparks we shared, would be really cold and maybe taste a little salty from where that little dimple that’s on top of everyone’s lips was steadily funneling October snot into his mouth. I wondered if his armpits were warm under his coat, I thought about shoving my hands in them.
The idea of being warm excited me more than the kissing. The kissing thought did nothing for me.
I thought about Rebecca Brooks who sat across from me in social studies, which is the only class where everyone’s desk is in a circle, to encourage democratic conversation. Rebecca who ‘fell out of the puberty tree and hit every branch on the way down’ according to one of Evan’s older brothers, and chews Juicy Fruit and snaps those bubbles with it that pop right behind the teeth, whose legs I can see double crossed under the table. I can’t even remember if she ever wears skirts. A normal guy would remember. Rebecca did nothing for me.
I thought (because of the same broken brain-part that makes me scared to hold a baby or go on a roof) about my uncle’s dick, which I’ve seen, not in a weird way, when we stayed at his time-share two summers ago, and I slept on the futon with the salty fabric that gave me the heebie-jeebies, and he went to the kitchen in the middle of the night with his bathrobe flapping and the pockets bouncing heavy with beers
It did nothing for me, thank God.
Thirteen years ago, the same year that I was born, they were finishing up this big construction project in the town two towns before my town on the Big Let Down River.
The project was that they were turning a big stinking garbage dump into a hospital.
My mom was most pregnant with me in the hottest part of the summer, and she couldn’t afford AC. So all summer she would sit on the dock at the widest point of the Big Let Down River, fanning herself and eating popsicles, and watch these big flat boats loaded up with excavated earth and ancient garbage inch their way down towards sea.
That’s where she was when her water broke. My grandpa came to the dock in his car and took her to the clinic to have me, and while she was there one of those big flat boats sunk.
My mom pushed and screamed, and my grandpa fretted and paced, and about 20 feet out from the dock the sinking boat’s stinking cargo of earth and rock and trash went tumbling down.
Later that week, when we came home, my mom took me down to the dock. Me all pink and pruny and her walking like a big ball of glass sat between her hips. Only this time there was a whole new island to look at over the battery fan and the popsicle and my bald head tucked into her chest. Thirty feet long sticking up about 6 feet out of the water. At that point it was only a few days old, just like me. It would be years before anything grew on it, before herons started building their nests on it, before reeds and cattails started shooting up around its edges.
Mom always says that island was the first and best birthday present she ever gave me, that the American dream is to own land and aren’t I lucky I have an island of my very own.
So that’s my birth right I guess Big Let Down River’s Stinking Trash Crash Accident Island and not wanting to fuck or even kiss anyone that much really and not even being gay.