......SHOCK! Everything slowed as my limp body crumpled to the floor. The cat stared contemptuously, temporarily diverted from his otherwise dutiful observations of the street below. There was a loud knock from up under the floor indicating my downstairs neighbor's annoyance at having his rituals interfered with. Every night this spring, a sickly sweet inconvenience would waft up through the open porthole, giving rise to certain suspicions I had. But that didn't matter now. The pain in my stomach was severe and disposition most unattractive to an untrained eye. It would not be a pleasant evening.
......I'd managed, not without difficulty, to stay sober for seventy-two hours. Not that I was endeavoring to build character, but I had to provide a blood sample the next day down at Probation. They'd caught up with me somehow though I no longer needed to report, so long as I stayed out of trouble. Stupidly, I never had my implant officially deactivated and must have unknowingly gone through a checkpoint.
......"Ssssshhhhhiiiitttttt!" I screamed, beginning to grasp the gravity of my situation while simultaneously reaching for anything I could get my hands on in a futile attempt to gain my fiancŽ's attention.
......I'd been relaxing, watching "World's Funniest Home Videos." Any other time, I might have laughed at the guy who hammered himself through a roof or a chorus line of octogenarians falling off a 5-foot stage. But at the time, I could not muster the strength to join in the laughter. Perhaps it was the Valerian Root Brownies Brigitte made, and which I ate on blind faith. Illegal cures had become popular in Lower East Sector. But as the room began to spin, the sounds from the avenue became a cacophonous blur and all I could muster was another slanderous, choked gasp for help.
......Twice I'd gotten off drugs, my sobriety lasting a total of 6 months. I'd managed to be discrete about my addiction, yet was always somehow losing ground. This was my third time on the proverbial wagon, but once again, there I was, eyes fixed upward in a continuous gaze. From full fetal position, I caught a glimpse of a cat jumping off a terrace in an unsuccessful attempt to catch a bird that made the TV audience howl. I couldn't help thinking that life was now laughing at me. And everybody was having such a good time.
......Meanwhile my Brigitte, who is a Dominatrix by trade, was about to go to "The Mezzanine," one of three dungeons at which she employed, with relish, the tools of her trade. She did a double take upon seeing me sprawled on the floor. Nothing rates a full gawk with her.
......"Oh god," she moaned. "What's wrong?"
......Jaded would be the wrong word to use in describing Brigitte. However she knew me to be a hypochondriac and expert whiner. And so, without hesitation, she methodically lifted my head onto a pillow in order to prevent any more brain bubbles from coming out of my ears. Convulsions are not a good sign, but rather than rush off on a mad tangent and pursue her own delicate brand of CPR, she made me comfortable. Still wet and wrapped in towels, she knelt down to see what was the matter.
......"Harry? . . . . . . Harry?"
......She lit a cigarette and picked up the phone.
......"Yeah hello? . . . . . I need an ambulance . . . . . I don't know, I got out of the shower and my fiancŽ must have collapsed . . . . 323 E. 4th Street, Apt. 4B . . . . Yeah just hurry."
......She hung up, confused about what to do next.
......"Jeez Harry, and tonight's my paper training session with that Mayor guy! This is just like the time you made me look in the toilet before I did that open mike."
......She continued to get ready for her 6:00 session. Still undressed, she hung herself out our third floor window watching for the Meditechs, unwittingly exposing herself to passersby who didn't know what to think.
......It wasn't long before they arrived, bounding up the stairs with their equipment. There were three of them; a fat, curly-haired magpie, the crack of whose ass was available to anyone interested, along with a red headed fellow. Clean cut and every bit his partner's opposite, the latter had one eye continually focused inside his meta-visor. Accompanying them was their supervisor, a 30ish looking woman with blond hair, tied back and sans helmet. She was pushing them around Ð a real butch.
......"Where is he?" she barked.
......"Over there," pointed Brigitte while applying her mascara and now growing increasingly agitated. This episode would really fuck up her night.
......"Do you get this a lot?" she asked the Supervisor.
......"Unfortunately more than we would like to."
......Now in her cat-suit, Brigitte picked up and began snapping her bullwhip when it appeared everyone wasn't moving fast enough. And then, the explosion.
......"MOVE IT YOU MAGGOTS!" she yelled as they nervously proceeded to trip over themselves.
......The supervisor tried to engage her so as to bring the tension down a notch. "Say, where did you get the cat suit and the bullwhip? I could really use something like this."
......The supervisor radioed ahead and sixty seconds later, it was into the ambulance and on to the Hospital. The EMTs were thoroughly intimidated by Brigitte's sporadic outbursts while I quietly frothed on a stretcher in the back. There was nothing to do but hold on and hope there were no leapers along the way.
......We peeled practically into the ER where, until our arrival, the staff appeared to be positively bored. The Head Nurse, a man of no small years and who had one too many cups of coffee asked what had happened.
......"I didn't hear a thing. I left him on the couch watching TV and when I got out of the shower he was like this."
......"What was he watching?"
......"I don't know, The McNeil-Lehrer News hour?"
......"Hmmm, I've heard of this before . . . "
......"Really?"
......"Yes. It has to do with all the red and green pixels on the telecomp."
......"But we have a monochrome."
......Half conscious, I made a pointing motion toward my open mouth.
......"Look, he's trying to say something," said the Butch.
......Brigitte cut me off. "If you say my cooking I'll end it for you right now!"
......People began to notice Brigitte's outfit and her breasts which were protruding eight inches outward and up. They were, to say the least, highly developed yet not totally beyond the capabilities of modern science.
......But for all her leather and attitude, she was no match for her own emotions, and began to sob uncontrollably. "Well DO SOMETHING!"
......The nurse took charge.
......"Alright, get him off the gravipod and onto a table, fast Mister."
......"But he's dead," said the Magpie.
......"I don't want to hear any generalities, just do it!"
......I couldn't move or speak and began to see my lifeless form from above as faces, one after the other came close to mine including Brigitte's. Faced with confronting the future alone, she kept telling me she loved me. The supervisor implored me to hang on while the Magpie waited until no one was looking to tell me he was going to book a session once I croaked.
......All I could think of was what I would say to my boss if I didn't show up for work the next day. After all, my mother had pulled more than a few strings to get me a job at her firm, and this could seriously damage her image. Thirty floors and the place still wasn't big enough for the both of us.
......The Emergency room was getting busy. Patients were wandering around in nightgowns with their hands around each other's necks as if engaged in some awful contest. A young resident doctor ran up alongside with plasma bags as the rest followed along. Brigitte was in a frantic state, jiggling and shaking while causing general chaos amongst the orderlies who had joined in, asking her name, number, astrological sign and so on. Nevertheless, If it was to be the last face I would ever see I wanted it to be hers.
......It figured my end would go something like this; a perverted circus of humanity, de-evolving any and all with whom we'd come into contact. But Brigitte still hadn't given up.
......"DO SOMETHING!" She started screaming. "DON'T JUST KEEP POKING HIM, HE HAS A LOW TOLERANCE FOR PAIN YOU ASSHOLES."
......"Who are you, his personal Sadist?" the redhead asked.
......"No I'm his fiancŽ."
......The nurse called for a doctor. "Doctor Fripp, Code Blue! . . . Would both of you shut up!"
......They loaded me onto an operating table.
......"What are we going to do?" asked the Supervisor.
......"Well, let's first consider the symptoms.... fever, rash, a characteristic odor, he's got a hard-on. What were you doing anyway?"
......Then slowly, the voices began to fade away as images, some going back to my childhood raced through my mind. Death was closing in. It is in those last desperate moments of life that we indirectly, and immediately plead our case to whatever God we worship. Why me? How could my life wind up like this? And if my death were to be drug related, it would be the final irony of ironies that it wasn't because I got high.
......I watched as they pumped my stomach from an ever-increasing height, first one foot, then two, three and then six feet. The doctors tried in vain to revive me, shooting me up with stimulants, and then giving me CPR.
......Finally, a middle-aged doctor, someone who belonged in an emergency room took over. He approached the table, and here he slipped in shit, looked at the monitors and began giving orders. Oblivious to the disapproving looks of his staff, he prepared me for the shockers while simultaneously attempting to scrape off whatever had affixed itself to his $200 designer shoes.
......"Alright everybody, CLEAR."
......Kuuzzzzccccc went the shockers.
......"One, two, three, four, five. . ."
......The Doctor listened to my heart.
......"Again. CLEAR!"
......Kuuzzzzccccc went the machine.
......"One, two, three, four, five . . ."
......He listened again. But by that point it was too late. I'd gone flat-line.
......He began massaging my heart, gave me another shot but none of it worked, and everything just sort of stopped. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
......Brigitte was inconsolable. The orderlies, techs and doctors waited for the right moment to make their move, while I'd been abandoned to whatever eternal destination would have me. There I was, left alone on an operating table in a City Hospital, without even receiving my last rights.
......I found myself floating in a void and remember thinking that, if this was death, that it wasn't so bad. A brief flash of hope radiated outward from the center of my being upon recalling a dream I'd had when still a kid. I was in a fishing boat that had capsized, being swept around and around in a whirlpool, like a carnival ride, until finally dragged down under. It was the only time I'd been given cause to consider the validity of reincarnation. And, like in that dream, everything stabilized until I was left floating.
......All was o.k. There was no sound, no pain, just . . . nothingness. I wasn't feeling terribly sad, or depressed for that matter. But the realization that I'd never see my friends or family or experience certain thrills like sex or skipping out on a check began to sink in. Yet, for the moment I was at peace because the rat-race appeared to be finally over. After all the squabbling, the hustling, the worrying ...... none of it mattered anymore. I was free.
......There was a profound sense of disappointment rattling around within me however, at my life having stalled when I started using drugs. As a collegiate I indulged in as much pot and booze as anyone else on a guitar scholarship. But a hard core drug addict and the lifestyle I'd been sucked into? How did that happen? None of that fit in with my plans for going into politics. Instead, my final waking moments would be of twisting and writhing on a couch in a lonely little habitat on the Lower East. Definitely not how I wanted to go out.
...... The time had come for me to reconcile all those wild episodes. Too late to pray, and with no more tomorrows to make up for all the rotten things I'd done, all the people I'd wronged would never know how sorry I truly was. What is that Bible verse about it being appointed once to each man to die, and then the Judgment?
......Now I'd probably have to sit through it all again; that first make-out party, my first bust, the Fantastiks, all before some trap door would open up and swallow me whole. Down the shoot I'd go - off to get my just rewards for all those times I'd slept through church. And there would be my mother, sitting in a chair in her living room, listening to Jim Nabors records... Good Lord.
......Then there came a booming voice from nowhere, and everywhere.
......"ALL THINGS SHALL BE MADE CLEAR."
......"Where am I?"
......"YOU ARE ON YOUR WAY TO THE TRUTH, MY SON."
......"The truth? And what's that?"
......"THE SUMMING UP OF ALL THINGS. BUT YOU'LL HAVE ABOUT A 45 MINUTE WAIT BECAUSE THERE ARE FOUR OR FIVE PEOPLE IN FRONT OF YOU."
......In an instant, I started warping ahead at breakneck speed while my surroundings quickly blurred.
......"My stomach ..... can't .... take .... this . . ."
......I tried to get the words out, hoping someone would ease up on the controls. I never liked roller-coasters, and now I was airborne and accelerating.
......"This is it," I thought. "I'm going to be disintegrated, splattered all over God's pristine windshield, a blotch forever on the screens of eternity.
......With my eyes shut and face now stretched to hitherto unknown proportions, I hurled spasmodically forward until there was a terrific impact. And it was lights out.

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