People sometimes leave stuff at my airbnb apartment. Usually it’s something I have no use for like milk or human insulin but a while ago, someone left a really nice grey slouchy hat. The guest was wearing it when she arrived and I noticed and thought it would look really good on me. So when she left it behind a few days later I tried it on and I was right. It looked really good on me, way better than it did on her. A few days later she texted me and told me she was pretty sure she had left her hat at my place. I texted her back to say I was pretty sure the guests who came after her had taken it.
I knew today was going to be beautiful and I was looking forward to going for a really good hike so, of course, I managed to slip on the wet mossy rock at the top of peak, twisting my ankle. It hurt like Hell and that surprised me because my childhood friend, Tawn Edwards, used to twist hers all the time and she said it hurt but she was mousy and flat chested and didn’t even kiss a guy til she was like 24 and I figured she just wanted the attention. Now I feel kind of bad but her parents must have thought the same thing because they never took her to the doctor. It took me an hour dragging myself down on my butt til I got to the barn. When I got there, there were people riding but nobody could hear me because a chain saw was going. It took me 8 tries throwing a rock before I was able to hit one of the horses. It bolted and threw its rider. Finally, the chain saw stopped and I was able to get help but I had to wait like 20 minutes while they made sure the rider had no concussion and they caught the horse. On the good side, the twisted ankle gave me a good excuse to try one of the other things left at my place.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about OxyContin. I read this one where this figure skater broke her pelvis. Apparently she been on the road to the Olympics, a future star. She got so hooked on Oxy, she started stealing from her grand dad and then almost killed him when he confronted her because she was jonesing so bad. What a fucking nightmare. Naturally, I was eager to try it out.
A younger me would have chopped it up and snorted it but, at my age, that just seems tacky. I haven’t snorted anything since the 80’s. Some of my friends were snorting cocaine even in the early 2000’s but it always looked sad and pathetic to me, like someone with thick calves trying to get away with ankle boots. It’s one thing to humiliate yourself but do you really need to embarrass the rest of us? So I washed a pill down with a glass of wine and set myself up with a heating pad and a bunch of NY Times magazines that I hadn’t gotten to yet. I did a Ken Ken first because, I figured, once it took effect, I wouldn’t be able to solve any. Then I started an article about Dupont knowingly poisoning everyone in West Virginia where Dan’s daughter works as a surgery nurse. That’s about the time I started feeling pretty nice. I put down the magazine and noticed Dan had left the tv on. and a movie called Racing Stripes was coming on. In it, this travelling circus gets caught in a big storm and somehow loses a baby zebra in a basket. That was the ‘stripes’ part of the title. This adorable baby zebra in a basket was stuck in the middle of the road during a huge thunderstorm. I was really very relieved when some guy came along in a pick up truck and took the baby zebra to his barn on a farm in Kentucky which of course had race horses. Hence, Racing Stripes.
So I figured I knew where this was headed but I was only partially right. Of course, the zebra ends up racing the thoroughbreds but what I didn’t anticipate was that I would be riding! The NY Times sent out some goggles a few months ago that you hooked up to your phone. You downloaded an app and watched a video in virtual reality. That was cool but what was going on now was much more sophisticated. I had no idea we even had it with our cable subscription. We were flying past the competition and then we were literally flying. It was wonderful and warm and peaceful and it stayed like that for quite a while until I began to feel the zebra’s hairs scratching the inside of my thighs. The zebra was hot and scratchy and uncomfortable but we were over the French Quarter by then so we descended and landed near the Abbey my favorite dive bar where I used to tend bar. I went in to get the zebra a bucket of water from the pump but it wasn’t the Abbey anymore. It was a brightly lit chicken place. That’s when I realized I was dreaming. I often go to the Abbey when I am dreaming and it is always a chicken joint. I knew pretty soon my teeth would start falling out and, when I reached into my mouth, I pulled out a large metal retainer that had cob webs on it. Then my teeth were coming out and I tried to keep track of them so I could have them put back in but they kept falling to the ground and rolling away. Meanwhile, the towel, the only thing I had on, started shrinking and the zebra hairs stuck to the inside of my legs had sprouted and I had black and white hair that I began to pull out in clumps leaving raw oozing skin with pustules. I pulled out clump after clump until I remembered the zebra and realized it was gone.
I searched the nearby French Market and then went to the river thinking maybe it had found the Mississippi but it wasn’t there and I felt nervous and guilty. Finally, I found the zebra just up the block from the Abbey at Kagan’s but, through my neglect, it had turned into a desiccated black rat laying in the shadows and panting from the heat.. I went to the bar to get water but no bartender was there, just a tv. On it a woman about my age in an acid washed denim mini skirt and fringed vest was telling a man that she dressed sexy to get attention from other men because her husband ignored her. The man responded by telling her, “I am not a Hassidic hillbilly with a snoot full of honey bees!” The woman opened her mouth to respond but the man tapped her on the knee and said “Just a minute”. He turned to me and I saw that his eyes had no irises, just red pupils, and his wide mouth was full of long yellow biege rodent teeth. It was Dr. Phil who also happens to be Satan. I don’t mean he is Satan because he is an exploiting whore but because I was in Hell and he was there. Years ago in Norway, I spent three weeks alone in the darkest part of winter in a tiny dismal apartment with almost no money, while my then boyfriend, Thomas Felberg, was recording an album in Sweden. I had no computer and no cable. I was so homesick and depressed that I actually looked forward every day to the one hour when the local tv channel would show Dr. Phil in English. Only Satan could make me look forward to watching that show. He put his face close to mine, so close I could smell his breath. It smelled surprisingly fresh, not at all like sulfur as I had expected. His red pupils went from my toothless mouth to my fist fulls of sticky hot zebra hair and broken teeth and then in his best most midwest chicken pot pie accent, Satan said to me, “How’s that werking fer ya??”