The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: One Day in the Doctor's office

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T.S. Eliot Goes to London • Whit.D Sitting in a room when in comes some guy brandishing a syringe and shouting, ‘yum yum yum’. everyone gets up and screams but I’m thinking hang on a minute this is silly I came here to wait for the doctor and this is what I’ll do. this syringe guy sees me and realises I’m not scared so he gets right up in my face. he’s so close that I can actually see that his skin is made of the finest china and if he was dropped he would shatter everywhere

So the man peers into my eyes and obviously doesn’t realise that I’m not blind so he waves the syringe around emphatically and screams ‘yum yum yum’. i hear everyone else that is cowering in the corner let out the gasp. if I hadn’t of heard it I would have known anyway because the room got a little tighter you see. Anyway I look at the guy and think for a minute. he’s clearly getting impatient so I rub my nose so hard till it bleeds blue ink and then smile and say ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’.

The man staggers backwards and backwards for miles and miles until he trips and slumps against the wall like a dead cowboy in an old western. I look round the room to see if anyone is gonna praise me but they all still look terrified so I just put on my dark sunglasses and light a cigarette. I go over to the man who has now dropped his syringe and offer him drag on my cigarette. He takes uneasily between erect fingers and bums it. I’m annoyed but I don’t mind too much cos my wife has got a tobacco farm in some country somewhere which is pretty sweet. so I’m sitting with the man wearing my sunglasses and he starts to cry. I ask him what the matter is and he just says ‘my father never loved me’. I look down at the floor and think for a minute, but it could have been a few hours. I ask the man how he knew his father never loved him. he crashes his face into his hands like a prolonged wave above the beaten rocks of the shore. ‘every Christmas my two brothers would get a train set or a football or something like that but all I would get every single year would be two maps of the New York subway system and a dollar bag full of broken glass’.

I smiled at the concept of a dollar bag which I didn’t think even existed. Then I thought he needed a reply. I said that’s not a valid reason to decide that his dad didn’t love him. He pondered for a minute and then he concluded that it was. I suggested maybe his dad was queer. Suddenly the man stopped. He froze almost as though his muscles were playing musical chairs and the music had stopped. (I suddenly noticed my nose had stopped bleeding blue ink but had now started to shrink). The man continued to pause. God I hope that doctor isn’t long. ‘My dad was queer,’ the man said. I asked him how he knew. ‘when I was ten years old I came home from school early once cos I had been sick on Jimmy Fourtooth who coincidently didn’t have a dad he only had three mothers and one of them hated him cos she was a feminist and Jimmy was a bit of old fashioned type of guy. Anyway I came home and walked into the living room and the sofa was my father kissing the local vicar. I remember because Father Grimbley was wearing the same sunglasses as you.’

I took off my sunglasses because I didn’t want to be associated with this bizarity. I asked the man if he was queer and he simply said ‘no’. I asked the man if he was straight and he simply said ‘no’. I asked him if he’s ever loved anything and he muttered ‘well I have always had an erotic passion for paint. The smell the touch and the appearance. you can manipulate it into something you want to see and it will let you…that’s the important part.’ I lit up another cigarette upon hearing this information and watched Allen Ginsberg do cartwheels past the window. Crazy Allen Ginsberg what will you do next? I turned to the man and said what an awfully odd thing was to be in love with paint and he smiled and said ‘that’s me in a nutshell’.

I got up to get him a drink from the water cooler and got my foot stuck in a bright green bucket. just then the doctor came out. I turned to the needle man and went to say FINALLY, as you do, but he was up again brandishing his needle and screaming ‘YUM YUM YUM’. I said to him that I thought we were making progress the doctor looked between the man and me with a puzzled look upon his face as his sideburns fell onto the floor. ‘would someone like to tell me what in Madonna’s name is going on?’ I sat the doctor and the man down and relayed everything that had just happened. The cigarette bumming, Ginsberg, queer dad and the love of paint. I then excused myself on the basis that I needed a piss.

When i came back the doctor was cradling the man in his arms and everyone had left. ‘I'm so sorry’ they were both saying. I wandered how long I had been having a piss for but then I lit another cigarette and put my glasses back on. I tried to walk over to them to ask what was going on, but whenever I got close they both started screaming at me. So from a distance I told the doctor that I think I was coming down with something because I keep seeing things when laying in bed at night in the mercury mist. The doctor ignored me so I went to walk out the door and go home. At the very moment right then and there Andy Warhol walks through the door with his arms folded and his dark glasses on. As I put out my arms to wave at him he slips on a banana skin and fall to the floor with a gigantic explosion of paint. as he does this the doctor drops the man who shatters on the floor.

So I left this mess of fine china dancing electrically among the liquid fields of magic. Now I think of it, I never did see that doctor.
© WhitD May 2009
whitd017@wsgfl.org.uk

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