WILL@epicqwest.com (a medicated memoir) by Tom Grimes
copyright © 2005 - all rights reserved
Novel excerpt — http://Will@epicqwest.com/will/the_memoir_of.htm — Chapters 1- 4
http://Will@epicqwest.com/will/the_memoir_of.htm
Granted, I’ve been wildly medicated. In my younger and more vulnerable years just before college, my mother hauled me out of bed where I’d taken to spending most of my time and took me to see a psychopharmacologist.
“What’s wrong?” they asked.
“I guess I’ve kind of lost my faith in things,” I said.
Ten seconds later I had a prescription for “The most popular antidepressant in the world.” Plus, a little Lithium, to cap any manic phases that might arise.
Other than that, I don’t suppose anyone wants to hear about my crappy childhood. All dysfunctional families are alike.
What’s important is, I’ve been on a quest, at least I believe I’ve been on a quest, to stop the sickness. Information Sickness. People have died from it. They’re still dying of it. I am dying of it. We all are.
But there’s a cure. And I’m here online to tell you about it.
Welcome to my Web site. Welcome to my memoir. Hola! Gutentag! Ciao! Howdy!
Call me Will … @epicqwest.com.
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Turbo Gopher Software and Faithful Laptop Companion—a.k.a. Spunky. Search: will/the_memoir_of/chapter_1In Which I Wrestle With the Issue of Purpose in an Unheroic World (and Sense That It’s Money)
I was not the embodiment of academic excellence in college. I had trouble adjusting to the notion of homework. In high school we had stopped receiving textbooks when the riverboat gambling resort qualified for non-profit status because it offered a twenty-four hour online chapel in a non-smoking section of the casino. Someone on TV was like, “Our tax base just shriveled.” Textbooks vanished.
My first semester’s G.P.A. appeared on my transcript directly beneath my mother’s credit card number, to which tuition, student fees and sales tax had been charged.
“1.55 is not very good, Will,” she told me during a “Friends Talk Free” promotional calling period, then refused to assign any enthusiasm to the fact that my G.P.A. was all prime numbers. “So is 3.55,” she reminded me.
We were silent. Ten percent of the charges for our silence went toward my tuition because we belonged to the university’s long-distance plan. I broke the impasse by promising to do better.
“Oh, I know. I wasn’t lecturing, was I? Your grandparents used to lecture me all the time. I was always like yeah yeah yeah.”
I assured her that she hadn’t reverted to any platitudes or hollow moral authority.
“God, I hated those clichés. Live within your means. Self-reliance.”
“The early bird should take a Xanax,” I said.
“Exactly.”
In the background, I could hear my mother’s forty-three year-old boyfriend, Roger, playing a video game. Mom and “the Rog” met on a discount airline flight between Orlando and Las Vegas. My mother had been a beverage and comfort coordinator, with full HMO coverage and a profit sharing plan, before the airline recorded so many crashes that it was grounded. Roger had up-graded his flight class from coach to business through his credit card Dollars-for-Miles Club, and he and Mom got to talking about the “25 Most Interesting Celebrities” issue of a magazine she’d offered him. After the flight’s late arrival, they began dating. Then the airline lost its wings and its stockholders, and Mom went to work thirty-nine hours a week for a talent agency’s contracts division. Thirty-nine hours meant the firm didn’t have to pay her health or retirement benefits. Her title was full-time temp.
We were silent again. I could hear the rustle of acid-free re-cycled paper and knew my mother was studying my transcript-slash-billing statement.
“Why are sports and recreation fees higher than your tuition?”
“The school’s building a new volleyball center. High tech. State-of-the-art.”
“Sand is high tech?”
“It’s imported.”
We drifted near the end of our conversation.
“It isn’t that I’m saying effort is pointless, Will.”
“I know.”
“It’s just that when I see what screenplays sell for today. This morning, a client said, ‘Return of the Clone People.’ I was like, if they’re clones, who cares if they return? You can make new ones!”
“P.S.”
“P.S. We had five offers by lunch.”
My mother had a secret plan to pitch a high-concept movie. She was convinced that, delivered at the perfect moment, a late Friday afternoon, say, at the end of a particularly profitless week, the stock market closing on a listless note, the Dow Jones average unchanged at dusky winter sunset, a time when all the TV shows had already been converted into movies, every merger approved and consummated, and there appeared a momentary lull in the money machine, some brief, terrifying zone of indifference be-yond sequels, at that moment, she believed, an indefinite article could fetch in the mid seven figures. She would simply enter her boss’s office, sit down and say, “The …. Coming—Memorial Day.”
“I just don’t feel I can give you any advice I can honestly say I subscribe to,” she told me.
I said, “I understand.”
After the call, I left my dorm room. From the campus hillside, I could see the interstate. Its access road’s necklace of motel and restaurant signs reminded me of the access road outside of Graceland, where mom and my vanished dad had taken me one Xmas years ago. Just us and a few Japanese tourists walking on a snowy Xmas eve through majestic rooms where Elvis had once worn diapers. The phrase “What golden days!” flashed through my mind. And it suggested to me that I should feel something I didn’t, or no longer could.
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Memoir Therapy, Chapter Two.In Which I Throw Some Landscape and Personal Existential Quandaries at You
The university I attended was built over a swamp that had been landfilled with garbage and toxic waste, then topped with asphalt. The admissions brochure denied reports of health hazards, calling them “exaggerated.” A photograph of students water skiing on the campus’s polluted bay, and information on a financial aid package that included tanning salon treatments, promised “successful applicants the best in education and entertainment.” The university was able to honor the entertainment part of its pledge as it occupied the buildings of an abandoned outlet mall that had gone bankrupt during the Easter vacation recession when consumer confidence dipped below the critical 230% mark.
We had an excellent food court and cinema facilities, although parking was a problem. Between zones for handicapped parking, multicultural parking, reverse-affirmative action parking, and parking for athletes and their agents, unrestricted parking for ordinary students could be summed up in one hyphenated word: non-existent.
On the bright side, I had been urged and medicated to see, parking fines accounted for 40% of the university’s operating budget and were instrumental in financing the new International Volleyball Institute. Administration officials described this as a “win-win situation for everyone.”
I was a Virology major. I had decided to study viruses, the ultimate information systems. Viruses are neither living nor dead; they simply copy the DNA codes of healthy cells. Then, before you know it, you’re sick, or dying. All because of the transfer of some information.
From the Virology Lab on the top floor of the pre-med building, I could see past the campus dorms and parking fields to the polluted bay. Tall reeds grew along its edge, spreading sleep and headache-inducing allergens as they rustled in the updraft of passing aircraft. Some days, when the sky resembled a scummy gray broth and humidity stalked whatever breathable air was available deep into the filters of the air conditioning generators, everything wavered like a TV image with bad horizontal pull. The concrete, the bookless library, even the dull silver whirring machines marked “Caution: Biohazard.”
Across the bay, shacks perched along the water’s edge, their window casings tacked over with plastic trash bags. Rusted appliances hunkered in muddy yards and dogs chased children around fishing craft resting on blocks in the dirt driveways. Now and then a trawler moved slowly toward the dying shrimp beds, or circled the oil spill site.
Beyond the shacks lay the airports, one commercial, one military, and a theme park. On foggy, rain-tattered days, airline jets coiled above the campus in holding patterns as fighter planes roared off on practice bomb runs. Petri dishes holding viruses spun on the lab’s countertops. Vibrations from the jet’s engines made test tubes ping and chink in their racks until I thought I was listening to some bad New Age xylophone solo. I couldn’t concentrate unless Walkman headphones blared around my ears. I once wrote that Pb was the periodic table notation for lead.
The only place to escape the bone-thrumming thunder of the jets was in the basement of the bookless library. In the quiet of the shelter, with my medications slowly taking hold and holograms of viruses glowing on Spunky’s screen, the absolute certainties expressed in scientific proofs almost convinced me that I was living in a world that made sense.
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Chapter Three: On Moral InstructionDetermined to make amends for my poor academic efforts, I went to see the student advisor at the University Guidance center, Dr. Mike.
As a student, Dr. Mike had held the intercollegiate golf champion title. Although he never succeeded on the PGA tour, Dr. M. did go on to write a best-selling paperback on the game’s virtues entitled, “When Jesus Is Your Caddy.” Twenty-five pages, large type. While he studied my academic performance on his large color monitor, I marveled at the fake gold-plated plastic trophies impressively lining his office bookcases. Then he swiveled his chair to face me.
“You bogeyed big time in semester numero uno, Will.”
I wondered if Dr. M. realized that he’d violated the English-only law in effect on campus. The law prohibited the speaking of foreign languages on university property, despite complaints from the student council arguing that the law infringed on a student’s constitutional right to order a burrito.
“Well, we’re chucking it. Wiping the slate clean. A fresh eighteen holes. What do you say?”
“You can do that?”
“Will, higher education isn’t a hole-in-one. You’ve got to learn your irons from your woods. You’ve got to know when to lay up and when to say that par is God’s will, too. Our goal is to graduate people, son. Now, how is discouraging you academically going to help? Do you think Jesus went around discouraging people?”
I was afraid to tell him that my knowledge of Jesus was limited to an episode of “Amazing Tales” and videos broadcast by the Christian rock channel.
“Success is a no-brainer. All it takes is following some pretty basic rules. First, you look to me like you’re in pretty good shape. So, pick a sport and stick to it. Number two: don’t drink to excess on school nights. Three: get involved, give something back. Com-munity spirit, volunteer work, the whole nine yards. Follow? And finally, do you have one of these?”
He flashed a “Safe Sex” brochure in my direction. I sensed by his arched eyebrow that he wanted me to keep quiet and take one. Then he printed out a copy of the schedule he’d designed for me. In addition to Viral Studies, I was enrolled in Great Diseases in History, Existential Philosophy and the Hollywood Tradition, How To Create An Investment Portfolio, and Advanced Volley-ball. Plus, I sat on the advisory committee to someone running for Student Body President.
“This is a lot of work,” I said.
“Son, our job is to train young people. Get ‘em up and running. Out into the marketplace.”
“My allergies and the jets really affect my concentration.”
“Pills. Great new strides in medicine every day.”
I wondered if my being on Prozac had turned up in my university dossier.
“Heck, why feel sick if you can just pop a little doo-hickey in your mouth and feel good as new twenty minutes later?” He sprang out of his chair and began to practice his putting along a strip of carpet. “If the noise bothers you, try ear plugs. Buy some study aids. Lay your hands on one of them white noise contraptions. Get creative. Accessorize.”
“Why am I in Advanced Volleyball?”
“Wilt, excuse my French, but you don’t want to see the sorry-ass crew we’d have to consign to Volleyball 101.” He stroked gently, then jerked backwards and cringed when he missed an easy six-footer. “Anyway, you’re too young for all this quiet desperation. That’s for geezers my age on low-sodium diets and prostate medication. Sports movies, my friend. Rocky, Hoosiers, Field of Dreams. Inspiring, mystical stuff. Some god-danged fine perfor-mances, too, if you ask me.” He pointed his putter at me. “Son, you don’t want to overlook the inspirational qualities of great sports films. Plus they’re like, what, forty-nine cents for three nights?”
#
Chapter Four: Beauty, Poetry, Love, Death, and AntihistaminesDuring my second semester, I gradually became comfortable amid the Virology lab’s electron microscopes. The framed reproductions of viral infection that hung on the laboratory walls began to feel reassuring, and at times I couldn’t distinguish them from the “Abstract Expressionist” canvases I had studied in “Art History and Advertising Techniques 101.” Hepatitis and Yellow Fever combined static color fields with a teeming sense of linear movement, and I believe the influence of cytomegalovirus can be traced to the vivid cellular-style compositions of Miro and De-Kooning. My term paper would have conclusively established the link between Pollock’s “drip painting” technique and cell infiltration patterns in Herpes virus with meningeal involvement, had I written the paper’s body and conclusion.
Then, too, I may have adjusted because my new lab partner Naomi was brain-numbingly beautiful, as well as suddenly fa-mous. To me and seventeen million other faithful subscribers of a national men’s magazine, the airbrushed image of Naomi reclining in a hayloft wearing only an unbuttoned lab coat and cowboy boots in the magazine’s “Girls of Campuses-Near-Interstates” issue captured the wholesome innocence of college life. The poignancy of her vulnerable, in-print admission that, “No, it’s not true that everybody where I’m from is KKK,” moved me as much as any animated Disney adaptation of a classic ever did. Consequently, my love for Na (long A) was pure. I swear I never jerked off to her photo spread, a claim seventeen million other guys probably can’t make.
I even wrote her a haiku, with the help of Spunk’s “E-Z Poetry” software, on the similar natures of viruses and love:
Lying dormant, you
infect me, parasitic
lover … oooh baby.
Naomi used to tell me that viruses were like men. “First they make you sick,” she said. “Then before you’re back on your feet, they’re off infecting somebody else.”
I assumed Naomi spoke from deep experience, as she had seventeen million potential boyfriends. I hated to see her suffer and wished that I could recite classic love poetry to her. But Shake-speare had been relegated to an elective in the Dept. of Sexist-Racist Studies. The only lyric I knew was “Let me compare thee to a summer’s day,” and the words had been addressed to a beverage juice in a commercial with people surfing.
Naomi wanted to be a veterinarian. What amazed me, and made me want to have children and live in a huge white farmhouse with her, was her incredible sensitivity. I remember how she wept when our virology professor arrived the first morning of lab and demonstrated how to narcotize, mark by perforation of one ear, then “de-life” by cervical dislocation the white mice we used as specimens.
After class, I consoled Naomi, without mentioning that her mascara had run and she looked like a satanist. “Come on, it’s not so bad. Look on the bright side. No pain, no gain. Tomorrow’s another day. Buy one, get one free.”
“I can’t stand to see little animals suffer,” she cried, still upset about the mouse. “Why do you think I don’t eat red meat? Only fish or chicken, sometimes.”
I assembled some clichés about the value of stoicism, emotional detachment and all around non-feeling. “Think of how Marsha from ‘The Brady Bunch’ would have handled it,” I said.
Then Naomi’s allergies began bothering her and she had a sneezing fit. I gave her an antihistamine, after checking that she wasn’t already taking Erythromycin, Ketaconazole or Itracona-zole for respiratory or fungal infections, since this combination can cause heart arrythymias. I did consider that Naomi might mistake a heart arrythymia caused by unsafe drug interactions for the pitter-patter of love. But I decided that my love was Platonic, and would remain so as long as I suspected the slightest chance of an emotionally crushing rejection.
“Here,” I said, “this’ll dry up your sinuses without causing drowsiness. Feel free to operate heavy machinery under its influence.”
Naomi took the pill and kissed me by bumping her cheek against my cheek. I was moved. Sharing prescription drugs might be the final romantic gesture. Soon we’d be sending valentines on prescription pads.
But can one expect true love in a world with mood pills and information, information, and more information?
