One Itch For Another

He’d gotten poison ivy during the pandemic of 2020. He’d always been especially sensitive to poison ivy ever since he and his younger brother got it as kids, leafing around for baseballs at a new-to-them practice spot. They both had to see a doctor because of their inability to stop scratching and because it spread to their face, near their mouths. Then again in his thirties, just cleaning up the yard of the tiny apartment he rented, he’d touched just enough to have it spread like a wildfire over his body to the point where the “physician” at the urgent care gasped not so conspicuously at this sight of his back. He missed a wedding and had to have a steroid treatment Mark McGwire would have been proud of. Ever since then he’d taken great care to be covered head to toe whenever he knew he would be venturing beyond a lawn. He was covered head to toe, including gloves and hat, when he walked through the woods of Goddard park in Rhode Island, as the Corona Virus pandemic was sweeping the globe. Still, the ivy found him, somehow someway. Whenever his pants lifted oh so slightly, it would reach out and swipe at his ankles, straining for the slightest touch of a hair or a tap tap of the lateral malleolus. It wanted to strangle his ankles but all it could do was reach, reeeaaacccch for a chance to poison him in the nanosecond when his skin was vulnerable. Vulnerable he was; and despite a shower upon return, in the morning—had he scratched himself in his sleep—he was covered with the will-crushing itchy oil. Not the best time to have to see a doctor, when the world is swept up in a pandemic, the proportions of which have shut down both the biggest city and the biggest economy in the world. As makeshift hospitals are being built in abandoned parking lots by the National Guard, car companies are shutting down production to make ventilators to help people survive, and every health professional from here to the tropics has to wear a hazmat suit 24/7, this guy is going to go to the hospital for poison ivy?

Yep.

Who has two thumbs and can’t take a shower because the itch nearly drains him of his will to live? 

Yep.

Off to his doctor he went. And just like last time, the doctor almost passed out when he took off his shirt. Covered in red bumps and purplish slashes of skin that made it look like he’d been burned or sliced with venom. Streaks and bruises and welts deformed his skin, making him hideous to take in, even for a moment. None of that mattered to him; he gave no thought to how he looked, not one. The itch burned him up so much he wanted to die to be rid of it. He nearly did. The doctor prescribed the toughest ointment made and he got a 55 gallon drum of it and was covered in mere hours. He’d also gotten another dose of steroids to speed the healing. It did nothing. Just the next morning, he suffered with an itch so strong it made him contemplate a life without skin. Corona virus meant nothing to him, nothing. The itch owned him and drove him to the emergency room before six a.m. The intake person gaped at him, the spread now up through the collar of a loose shirt, climbing his chin, reaching for his ears, like a red skinfire driving up his body. He was admitted for poison ivy during a pandemic. Let that sink in. He didn’t have cancer, a broken bone, his carotid artery wasn’t cut, he hadn’t been shot, he itched. But he wore the mask and he could see the look of horror in their eyes as they fumbled to try to help him without touching him. A pandemic known for its social distancing doesn’t help a guy with poison ivy lesions covering his body like some fucked up tattoo. What could they do though? More ointment? More steroids? This shit was swallowing him, gulping him down starting at his ankles and shoving him down the poison ivy gullet, itch by itch. He was in tears when the last doctor looked at him, before they decided to induce a coma. The logic being, you can’t itch when you’re in a coma and if you can’t itch, you can’t spread it and more importantly, you can’t suffer. And he was suffering. Anyone telling you the itch from poison ivy isn’t suffering can rot in hell. He was in hell as that itch tore at him and his mind. Nothing else mattered. Who goes to the emergency room during the pandemic of the twenty-first century, if they aren’t suffering. But as the medically induced coma took hold, the itch faded away, like wisps of clouds that dissipate to blue sky, along with his consciousness.

Here’s the rub about being in a medically induced coma during the pandemic of the twenty-first century: you aren’t exactly priority number one, or one thousand. So when he came to, two months later, he was itch free but now suffered from kettle drum pangs of hunger punching through his stomach. He didn’t even know he was down to one hundred and twenty five pounds, from his usual one seventy five. Technology meant no bed sores but it would have been little in comparison to his hunger pain.
“Eat this,” a female voice told him, a white tube like a garter snake now dangling in front of his face. Hearing the word eat was music to his ears but when he tried to lift his arm, it was as if free will had left him—asked him, “Where’s my money Jack?—because it wouldn’t go. When he looked down at it, as if looking at it would make it work, it just nervous-shook a little. His other arm did the same thing. Before he could say I can’t, the tube top was ripped off and the sweet liquid/yogurt was in his mouth and the pleasure of food and nutrition dropped his weak arms to the bed as tears pebbled from his eyes. “You’ll have to be brought along slowly,” the female voice told him. He knew the voice was female but what he saw in his hazy periphery was something like an industrial, futuristic hazmat suit and an even more futuristic head wrap with mirrored goggles hovering over him, reflecting his wan self. When the tube was emptied and the feeling of nutrition spreading from within, she said, “I’ll come back.” He followed the figure with his eyes as she moved back to step on something and lower the bed. A gentle whirring noise filed from underneath as the beige ceiling began to roll into view. The legs of the hazmat suit scraped together and heavy boots clopped the floor and she was gone. It was the beige ceiling and sounds. It was a date. But the heavy petting only started when he realized that he was not in a hazmat suit and he was not in some futuristic bubble-wrapped hospital room with bells and whistles and beeps beeping and monitors monitoring, free from whatever virus it was that was churning up deaths when he was induced. The what-ifs began to split, like cells, from one to two and two to four...and fuuuuuck, he’d traded one itch for another.

But She Can Still Hear

I tried your national pride

Spent every cent till I quit for lent

Dabbled in your meritocracy

Till I realized the hidden fees

Of privilege and more privilege

Which only drove me out to the ledge

Suicidal from poverty that you can’t even pin on me

Poor people need to stop being poor

Need to boot strap for all their more more more

Remodeled kitchens and country club memberships

Ivy league tuitions and never sweating a twenty percent tip

I even tried your Christianity

Till I realized those hidden fees

Wouldn’t trade hating all those other others for my sanity

Wouldn’t embrace your misogyny with arms open

Couldn’t swallow your homophobia, despite all that hopin’

And praying to an anthropomorphic god more jealous than I

Just can’t abide, slide, explain away

My conscience, like war, what is it good for?

My money’s on the table and my bet’s on man

But not on uncle sam

He took me out back behind the shed years ago

His nudie mags and cheap alceehol he did show

But when I passed out he took his turn

And now my life is a slow burn

Down to the ashes of the cigarettes causing cancer

And the opioids that can’t kill the pain I cause her

Lady justice I mean

She’s blind you know, so they robbed her

But she can still hear

Bell Did It

“I thing I drang too mush,” he slurred. “I think we all...drank...too much,” he offered between dry heaves. Stone was currently puking in the toilet and Bell was puking in the sink. ‘In’ being a relative term because both of them were missing their respective targets in different ways, with Bell ricocheting Taco Bell infused vomit all over the vanity—shit-colored specks dotting the mirror like tiny spitballs, while Stone, so drunk he could barely see, puking directly onto the floor in front of the toilet despite both hands holding onto the bowl so tight one would have thought he was hanging on for life. What wasn’t known to any of the drunks but Stone was that with every heave of his ho, shit was filling his size 38 underwear. Even Fraternity bathrooms get cleaned up at some point. Not usually by the rich trouser stains that soil them up to waste level, but still. But the hosts of the “party” where Stone is shitting his pants, obliteratingly drunk as well, have no idea what they are in for. Cleaning vomit out of a bathroom is easy enough with 800 rolls of paper towels and some version of a mop. Windex can clean a mirror no problem, even if it is specked with burrito vomit. And my god, back in those days, everyone had Clorox on hand. In a few hours, Stone will raise his head off that bathroom floor, his right cheek will suction out of his own quesadilla and beer vomit, with his brain pounding with cement fists to escape his skull “LET ME OUT LET ME OUT!!!” His sandy-blond hair littered with cheese, almost-caramelized onion, and digested hamburger meat the FDA didn’t inspect, will not bother him an iota. He’s got to get his pants off. His undies are full of shit. He can feel it, worse he can smell it, even over the stench of vomit from two different people who ate the same awful food and drank the same cheap beer and shot the Jager shots till their bodies rebelled convulsion style. Always one of superior hand eye coordination—he once struck out 17 batters in a 21 out game—Stone, still jarringly drunk, was able to somehow stand, remain standing, and get his pants off, without falling into the vomit covered floor. This was a feat. Not a 17 strikeout feat but a feat nonetheless. All that remained was the shit-filled underwear. And the stench. The stench of a gyro and beer, more beer than gyro but still two large gyros, lunch digested defecation, now two hours old, steaming and accumulating foulness in his fruit of the looms. “Oh, ahh, grrbb,” he whispered in the dark. It was dark but he could see the toilet—a beautiful red rose nightlight illuminating his salvation. Hand now on the wall steadying him, he slid the other under the waistband, pulled out and crouched in drunkpain/discombobulation until one leg was out and the undies dropped to the floor, heavy with chocolatey, bulbous feces. A shit he’d never shat before. “Oh, gulln, dehu,” he exhaled with delight and relief, the stench now further from his nose. He looked down and his drunken, blood-red eyes glowed hot upon sight of it. “Toy he vehumi,” he mumbled. He carefully got the other leg out of the underwear. As carefully as an 8 shots of Jager man can. There, drunk, in the bathroom, donned in white ankle socks and a Cleveland Indians t-shirt, penis shriveled and cold, he knew what he had to do. Get rid of the evidence. No one could know he shit his pants. He may have been drunk but he wasn’t stupid. And that red rose nightlight, haloed the bowl in an aura of peace he hadn’t experienced since his first hand job from Tara Weaver back in 84. But, he hadn’t packed any underwear. He had one pair for the weekend. They packed light back then. He couldn’t just toss them like a used condom after a romp in the pool shed with Christie Langham back in 87. With his brain still pounding to get out of his skull, he was somehow able to fire up the circuits and have a thought. In the glow of the itty nightlight he reasoned that he could swirl his poop-heavy underwear in the eddy of the flushed toilet. The undies, smeared and replete with ungodly feces, could be salvaged—a veritable washing machine in front of him. He creaked down to the undies on the floor, one hand against the wall for support, and grabbed a non-shit smeared portion of waistband with two desperate fingers. “Oill degallum,” gurgled from his throat as he rose, undies held as far away as possible, in hopes of not vomiting again. Now all he had to do was flush. But the lever was on the other side. Shit, he’d have to move. The inches may well have been miles in his condition. Jager burps with every quarter-inch flat-foot shuffle, he got close enough to flush, after ten minutes of shuffle stop brace, shuffle stop brace. Finally, left hand on the silver that would ignite his resurrection, and clean his drawers, he flushed in the glow of the rose nightlight. Before he could appreciate the moment, he realized he had to bend. “Digh forkeylop,” he blurted as all the pain of hangover collapsed into his body in one fell swoop. He missed it, he missed the flush, he couldn’t bend. Throb after throb after pulse after pulse of pain ramrodded his brain. “Safuotip brojjew!” Agonizing and yearning to be lifeless, he watched the eddy go wasted, the gurgles a rueful reminder of his bender. He waited in pain. There have never existed a longer two minutes in the history of the universe. This time he would bend first, then flush. He may have been drunk and hungover, holding shit-filled underwear, but he was still drunk and hungover with a plan to bend then flush. He bent, he flushed, then lowered the soiled mess down into the eddy to watch it be cleansed and rid of his waste. But the swirl, the swirl was like Niagara fucking Falls and it ripped the undies from his hand -give me those!- and gurgled and burgled them down the hole, as tears began to fill his eyes. Just until he saw the water begin to come back up the hole, and up and up, higher and higher, then panic filled his drunken bloodshot eyes and his heart as the dirty water rose over the bowl and onto the floor in waves of brown with bits of brown and his toes were suddenly ice cold. Not remotely sober, he realized he’d gotten rid of the evidence and left the bathroom as if returning to a nap after a mid-morning sesh with Angie Hermann back in 92, found a pair of sweatpants in his bag and passed out on the bag, feet still wet.

The next morning (near noon actually) there was a tremendous hungover uproar outside the bathroom. As if happening upon a mystery he’d been privy to all along, feces caked to his inner thighs, bag of Doritos already in his hand, fingers and lips already orange, he said, “Oh that. Bell did that.”