" Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls. He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-Coffin Cemetery, to corner the condom market during the rubber shortage, to run a mail order whorehouse, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the racetracks of the US. His reverses in business were matched only by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors on Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eye when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in Panama City Park. He had been trapped between floors in an elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of the D T's while stowing away in a footlocker. There was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gang-fucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in the ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot sulphuric acid."
S.S. America off Jersey Coast.
"Ladies and gentleman there's no cause for alarm. We have a minor
problem in the boiler room but everything is now under..." (Sound
effects of a nuclear blast). Explosion splits the boat. Dr. Benway,
ship's doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with
one stroke of his scalpel.
"Perhaps the appendix is already out doctor" the nurse said peering
dubiously over his shoulder. "I saw a little scar."
"The appendix already out !?" the doctor shouted. "I'm taking the
appendix out! What do you think I'm doing here?"
"Perhaps the appendix is on the left side doctor," said the nurse.
"That happens sometimes you know."
"Stop breathing down my neck I'm coming to that! Don't you think I
know where an appendix is? I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard."
He threw back his elbows in a movement of exasperation.. He lifts the
abdominal wall and searches along the incision dropping ashes from his
cigarette. "And get me another scalpel! This one has no edge to it."
He thrusts a red fist at her. The doctor reels back and flattens
against the wall from the force of the explosion with the bloody
scalpel clutched in one hand. The patient slides off the operating
table spilling intestines across the floor. Dr. Benway sweeps
instruments, cocaine, and morphine into his satchel.
"Sew her up!" he said, peeling off his gloves. " I can't be expected
to work under such conditions."
Dr. Benway. Carrying his satchel pushed through the passengers crowded
around Lifeboat No. 1. "Are you all right?" he shouted, seating
himself among the women. "I'm the doctor."
Another bore carries around a suitcase full of trophies
and medals, cups and ribbons: "Now this I won for the
Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold
him, he's desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me him-
self and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up
all castrated their selves with harakiri knives. And I won
this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran
meeting of Junkies Anonymous."
"Shot up my wife's M.S, and her down with a kidney
stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a
Vagamin and tell her, "You can't expect too much relief.... Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medications.
"Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother's
ass."
The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and administers a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting
septum: "An awful purulent discharge is subject to How
out... just wait till you see it."
He does a strip tease to operation scars, guiding the
reluctant fingers of a victim. "Feel that suppurated
swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranulomas.... And now I want you to palpate my internal hemorrhoids."
Well this, ah, folkloric text from the Federal Narcotics Hospital
in Lexington Kentucky, well, more of a Prison really - people did
sentences there, was actually inspired by Juvenal, the Roman
satirist. He's speaking of Greek parasites and sycophants;
"All arts, all sciences a fasting Greek knows. Bid him go to hell,
to hell he goes...If you but say you're warm, he breaks into a
sweat...If you complain of a draft, he calls for his overcoat."
There is an exclusive wing of Lexington reserved for the
do-rights, who are considered good `rehabilitation' prospects.
They get better rooms and more medications. A do-right always
shows up with letters from his congressman, banker, employer,
and, you know, pictures of himself as an Eagle Scout, shakin'
hands with a priest on graduation day.
There's no limit to what they'll do. You know the type. Bawls
all over himself to light the boss's cigarette.
The Doctor walks into the ward and says,
"Rather warm in here."
As one man the do-rights break into a sweat and rush around
opening windows.
"Cold in here isn't it?"
Immediately the do-rights see their breath in the air, snatch
blankets and bundle themselves up to a chorus of chattering
teeth. Front office brown-nose finks to the bone.
"Doctor, when I die I want to be buried right in the same coffin
with you! You're the finest, most decent, most _deeply humane_
man I have ever known."
"I'm puttin' you down for additional medication, son."
"Thank You, doctor! A pusher should receive the death penalty."
Of such stuff are do-rights made. It's the Old Army Game from
here to eternity. Get there firstest with the brownest nose.
Well, down in the dim gray wards and day rooms where the
do-wrongs hock and spit and shiver and vomit,
"Fuckin' croaker wouldn't even give me a goof ball...He
asked me what the American Flag means to me and I said
`Soak it in heroin Doc, an' I'll suck it!' Says I've got the wrong
_attitude_. I should see the Chaplain an' get straight with
Jesus."
And then, with the tears streaming down their lousy fink faces,
the do-rights leap up and bellow out the Star Spangled Banner.