John Laurence

I'm waiting. Waiting in this fucking little sterile room with Adam slumped next to me. We've been here for two hours waiting for them to call my name so I can get my colpo and my icing to get rid of the fucking warts on my cervix Adam gave me. He gave me them unknowingly, but I still hate him for it. And now he's started drinking again and as he's slumped down in the chair against me, I can smell the Rainier fermenting through his skin and the cigarettes and the sweat and all the fucking we've been doing lately. Cuz now he's horny all the time. Now he's telling me all this good stuff all the time, like how he's always hot for my fat ass and how all the guys we know want my fat ass, which is weird cuz he's always made me feel like my ass is taking over the world and I even stopped smoking pot because I'd eat for hours after we got high. All these things he's never said before and now I know for sure that he's the one. But for now we're waiting.

I'm reading "Ask Isadora," the sex column, which I read every week cuz I'm wait-ing for her to print something about warts, even though by this point I know pretty much everything there is to know about warts—on an intimate level, you might say—but I wait for Isadora to write something about them anyway, so I don't miss a week. I'm there at the corner at 6:30 after my lunch shift reaching into that grimy newspaper box for my Isadora with one hand and my Jo-Jo Special in the other—a double mocha with a lump of biscotti at the bottom and that nitrous oxide whipped cream shit I always take a hit off before I slam it back into the walk-in. On the street with my face in the whipped cream and Isadora under my arm, I'm walking to the practice space to meet Adam where he'll be sitting on that shiny new Marshall playing with his head bent over the body of his guitar like he's playing me. But for now we're waiting.

They call my name and of course they don't know how to fucking say my name so they say Jo-Jo Foojay but really it's Jo-Jo Fudge. I mean how hard can it fucking be? So Adam shifts in his chair as I get up cuz he knows I won't say nothing cuz I get that Foojay shit all the time, and then he snorts and kind of growls at the chick, "Jo-Jo FUDGE." And it sounds so good to me when he says my name that I know again and I think of my ass, that he's the one.

So I go in and the chick seems kinda pissed now cuz Adam said Jo-Jo Fudge to her and so now she says with her uglyassed burgundy hair, "Okay, Miss Fuh-duh-juh, undress from the waist down, and the doctor..." but she gives me this look like I'm a fucking dog leaving my prints all over her goddamned white room and I see the stirrups as she shuts the door and I just think, Whatever. Adam and I have one word for her kind. San Jose. I reach up under my panties, which makes me think of Adam cuz he got me these at the thrift store near a place we stayed for a while and he actually paid for them so they're my favorite. And I think about what he's doing out in the waiting room now, with the high-school shits smirking behind the glass door at him, and I think back to the time we walked into Delores High School just for fun and got the shit beat out of us. See, cuz even in the City there's a lot of San Jose.

So I get up onto this table and I'm waiting again, this time for the doc. They have this freaky poster up on the ceiling right above where my head will be when I lay back down. I've done this a lot now, but that poster freaks me out every time cuz it's like a trip to hell. All these psychedelic dark blue and green whales and shit with this fluorescent under-the-ocean crap going on, and I don't know what the hell in that is supposed to keep me from thinking about the pain and the metal shoved up inside me. It just makes me trip harder but I look and look and then I just close my eyes, but then they always tell me to open them cuz I guess people pass out a lot up here.

He comes in, this doctor who's gonna probe and ice me. And then San Jose comes back in too and I think, Fucking great. If Adam knew he'd shit but he wouldn't do nothing cuz he's been drinking too damned much the past week. I can smell on the doctor some kind of strong something that smells a little like old Night Train and it makes me think of where we're going after this, to the detox. I've never been before but Adam has and now I have to go with him to check him in and see if they have any cots so he can DT for a few days and then come back again and be normal. But for now I'm listening to this exile-from-Russia doctor man who reminds me of Einstein even though I don't know where the fuck he was from, and then I'm sure that Einstein was American. 

Dr. Russia starts fingering me and already I'm queasy. I'm looking up with my eyes wide open and San Jose says to me, “Take. Deep. Breaths.” I'm already taking deep breaths but there's just no use cuz I'm spread fucking eagled here and Dr. Russia's got the cold ice-pick thing up me and now I know it's all over. I'm breathing still though and I got my eyes open and I'm swimming looking up at those goddamn whale things when Dr. Russia says, "Now dere might be some peeenching just NOW and how do you like dat poster up dere, huh?" Ohohohohohoh, is all I can think and I say, "Fine," and I keep thinking about the letters O and H and then Santa and then those old O’Henrys Adam used to binge on and I close my eyes. San Jose says, “Open your eyes open your eyes open your eyes,” but I don't, I can't, and pretty soon those whales get me thinking about wild elephants and the time Adam told me he detoxed dreaming and screaming about herds of pink elephants like cartoons and I start giggling cuz when he told me it was so funny cuz we'd just dropped X and everything gets funny then and I'm shaking so hard all over and the last thing I hear is Dr. Russia saying, "Yah, I put dat up dere myself."

They bring me to with those funny little smelling salt things that make your nose twitch cuz you think they must be pouring acid down your nostrils but they aren't and I shake my head and see the whales on the ceiling and know where I am and then San Jose says, “Are. You Okay?” And I say, “Uh-huh,” and then feel that they still got the stuff inside me so I don't move. She says, “We're almost done here,” and then Dr. Russia says the ice is melting and that it looks like an inverted ice cream cone on my cervix and I'm thinking, Wow, I never passed out before, and that Adam would be freaked.

So then I have to wait some more because the ice inside me is melting and it takes awhile so they put me in the Recovery Room and that's all I want to do is Recover so it's great I get to sit in that room. But really I'm not sitting, I'm lying on some kind of rattan thing where you lay back and they put this heating pad—I swear to god like the kind blue hairs use for their backs—and they put that on my stomach to keep me hot and melt the ice cream cone and as I lie back I look up at the ceiling but there's nothing there. So I wait. But this time with my eyes closed and nobody bothers me.

Finally I get the blue hair off me and I get to go and they ask me for a donation and I just look at the high-school-smirking shit and say, “Sorry,” even though I'm not, and walk into the waiting room and he's not there. So I pretend I expected that so the high schoolers don't clue and I walk out to the elevator and there he is slumped over the single chair next to the elevator and I'm embarrassed cuz I know everyone can see and smell him so I say, “Hey, fuck, get the hell up.” And then we go.

But this is the part I hate. The part I hate is every time we're on the street Adam has to have a beer in his hand or at least in his bag just so he knows it's there. Like this morning the first thing he does is get up and walk to the liquor store so he can fix and then from there he's fine, he's okay, but still it's not the same cuz he's got a fifth of Popov burning a hole through his stomach by then and I hate to watch him drink Popov cuz it's the nastiest shit on the shelf and it makes you piss blood. But now I'm all right cuz we're on our way to the detox so at the cash register Adam buys beer and I think about DTs and cots and pink elephants and know that everything will be okay.

On the bus I pay for Adam and hold him around the shoulder as everyone looks at me and then at him and I think again about San Jose. Adam doesn't fall but once we get to a seat he just lays across my lap and I hold his head in my hands. Out the window I count the blocks to the detox and wonder how Dr. Russia climbed up on the stirrup table and tacked the whales to the ceiling and then why he called my cervix an ice cream cone. I feel leaky and itchy and as Adam's head sways from side to side with the bus the ice cream seeps out through my legs and I think of  blood.

The detox is this shitty, smelly little place South of Market with a black door and a handwritten sign about hours and beds that looks like some junkie scrawled it while shaking to death. Inside I help Adam to a chair next to all the real drunks who eye me up one side and down the other with their glazed half-open eyes as I walk back up to the front to sign Adam in and then sit back down. There's a six-hour wait right now so I put my sunglasses on Adam so he'll sleep and he says, “We could meet some real nice people here, Jo,” and the way he curls the side of his lip up the way only drunks can do when they're half out makes me laugh and I feel the leaking between my legs and know again that Adam, for sure, is the one.

I pull out my secret stash of peanut M&Ms and we sit and hand-to-mouth it awhile watching Ernest Goes to Somewhere on the tube they have attached twelve feet up on the wall but none of the other drunks are watching it, they're just watching me. It's only been fifteen minutes and I look around at all the other men and I feel peeenching in my stomach and Adam is starting to shake and whine like he needs a drink and the poster of the whales and the pain starts to black everything out until I remember the acid of the smelling salts and then I'm all right again and I think, Okay, we're waiting.

But then it all starts to go wrong. Adam gets up and wanders around looking for a bathroom and the whole time he's moving he's singing songs and pulling his hair and then digging in his backpack for the bottle he brought, which he emptied on the bus. I try to concentrate on Ernest but I can feel everyone watching me and waiting for me to do something about Adam to calm him down or shut him up but I won't, I can't. I can only feel the pain between my legs and the blood start to seep through my jeans under my ass and the junkie next to me nudges my arm and nods toward Adam who's on the floor now curled up around his backpack crying and there's nothing I can do anymore because the pain is giving me hot flashes and I feel like I'm on fire and my face flushes red from the pain in my stomach and embarrassment over Adam and my ass and I can't stand up. So I close my eyes and lean my head back and see the whales. I hear Adam crying and want him to shut up and then think maybe he's not, not the one. And I think of my ass. And the blood. And the whales. And how Adam is still crying. And how there is nothing I can do.

So I'm waiting.