The Book of It - 1
Legal drugs are the best drugs. The products of scruffy or sleek dealers don’t come near. Legal drugs are more potent. The ones in hospitals, the best.
I remember them wheeling me toward a death movie. I was on a gurney swung along hallways painted with dark paint. I thought hospitals were supposed to be swathed in antiseptic white. Not in those far reaches, evidently, where they take you where no one sees. No visitors here. This is a different world. It deserves this somber, darker paint. This is a one-way corridor. Toss the dice, inhale the drug that takes you there, teetering on the edge of no return.
I remember that nearness to the end. I figured it must be the way to the end. The soundless footsteps pushing my body that was laid down, strapped down—and those padded steps began to slow. They had been fast and efficient before, pushing exactly where we were going, going.
Then some turns, and in a narrower hall I saw that Hades has cabinets up high in its walls. I could see from my slowing rush through that echo-y but silent corridor. Those square cabinet panels up high—why so high?—had those big levered pull handles like walk-in commercial freezer’s snap-shut doors. But not really. These are the handles on morgue slide-out-the-body doors, and these are up high. I know they are for corpses.
I had seen them, just like this, but smooth without handles to open them—in my script.
And in my script the drawers open to release the corpses in their pasty make up and their clothes slit up the back so the undertakers could dress them easily and lay them in those caskets lined with white satin. Nights in white satin?
Remember the feeling because when it’s you laying there you won’t remember. I had seen the dead behind their sealed wall spaces. It was in that place that hid their dead truths behind makeup and make-believe that you’re taught to believe in. Hollywood Forever.
What clown, what true believer in Los Angeles names a cemetery that? “On the nose,” don’t you think? That’s the note you would have gotten on the script. On the nose! And for me being pushed toward death, seeing those pull-out corpse drawers, those squares in the wall, they knew I’d be changed forever. The others would change me, those actors hidden in surgical masks. They were going to cut away part of me. Bones gone forever, cut off with a power saw.
And then a turn and a final push, and fussy jerking into a precise alignment. Just so. Above me now are the big Klieg lights of the operating theater. My body will be cut into—will I feel the blood rushing out, and sawed apart on this stage filled with these serious actors? Serious, this theater. And then I am gone.
Waking up is something I don’t remember. Did I? These days and months later maybe I am gone? Unalive? I can’t tell. If I am that means my life is beyond the churlish step by step of my unworthy acts. Of too much left undone. Of my only speech being the speech that is within me. Within me. Too silent to be even an echo chamber. Of course. But not because that would produce real terror.
Real terror is only what I make it. Who is there to hear it with me? Share the horror? No one. Maybe Poe. Yes, that one. I fantasize still, again, always. I think that maybe him, that translator of waking up in that tomb of the Ushers, knows. Or the Egyptian Pharaohs know. I feel that and fear it. Maybe I’ve done it. Can any of us prove we are real? This is real? Maybe we are all just complicit, pushing each other along because after all, we’re here together, might as well make the best of the fantasy.
What trusting animals we must be. Like dogs stroking each other to gain our trust so that we’ll eat the poison treats that are offered and that taste so good. Treats keep us alert to live the lie that we are living.