Departure[s]

The other day, I discovered an alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact.

I have an old friend, a consultant radiologist, who for years has been sending me clippings from the British Medical Journal. She knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme. In my memory – that place where degradation and embellishment overlap – I have filed away cases of patients who exploded when a heated scalpel ignited their bodily gases, and others from the early days of the MRI scanner when internal metal stitches were shot like shrapnel into soft flesh. These stories are sometimes accompanied by photos: for instance, of a man who grew his toenails to such a curling length - several metres, as I recall - that for years he had been unable to walk. Then there is the medical profession’s everyday task of removing unexpected objects which have been swallowed – like bags of nails - or forcibly indulged up the rectum. (In the old days, popular anal self-implants were miniature busts of Napoleon, a habit which doubtless added patriotism to pleasure.) And a case I particularly remember, of a man who had been fitted with a tracheostomy tube. When he went for a check-up, doctors were baffled by yellowish stains around the hole into which the tube was fixed. It turned out that the patient was a desperate smoker who, unable to inhale through his mouth any more, discovered that if he took out his tube, the cigarette fitted perfectly in the hole; all he had to do was light up and inflate his lungs. Men (and most of these bizarre activities were undertaken by men) can be most ingenious, even - or especially - when it goes against their own best interests.

From the archives

The Sellout

Most times cops expect to be thanked. Whether they’ve just given you directions to the post office, beaten your ass in the backseat of the patrol car, or, in my case, uncuffed you, returned your weed, drug paraphernalia, and provided you with the traditional Supreme Court quill. But this one has had a look of pity on her face, ever since this morning, when she and her posse met me atop the Supreme Court’s vaunted forty-fourth stair. Under a pediment inscribed with the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, squinting into the morning sun, windbreakers dotted with the dandruff of fallen cherry blossoms, blocking my entrance into the building. We all knew that this was a charade, a last-minute meaningless show of power by the state. The only one not in on the joke was the cocker spaniel. His retractable leash whirring behind him, he bounded up to me, excitedly sniffed my shoes and my pant legs, nuzzled my crotch with his wet snot-encrusted nose, then obediently sat down beside me, his tail proudly pounding the ground. I’ve been charged with a crime so heinous that busting me for possession of marijuana on federal property would be like charging Hitler with loitering and a multinational oil company like British Petroleum with littering after fifty years of exploding refineries, toxic spills and emissions, and a shamelessly disingenuous advertising campaign. So I clear my pipe with two loud raps on the mahogany table. Brush and blow the gummy resin onto the floor, stuff the bowl with homegrown, and like a firing squad commander lighting a deserter’s last cigarette, the lady cop obligingly flicks her BIC and sparks me up. I refuse the blindfold and take the most glorious toke ever taken in the history of pot smoking. Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I’m getting high in the highest court in the land. The officers stare at me in amazement. I’m the Scopes monkey, the missing link in the evolution of African-American jurisprudence come to life. I can hear the cocker spaniel whimpering in the corridor, pawing at the door, as I blow an A-bomb mushroom-cloud-sized plume of smoke into the faces that line the giant friezes on the ceiling. Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon—these veined Spanish marble incantations of democracy and fair play—Muhammad, Napoleon, Charlemagne, and some buffed ancient Greek frat boy in a toga stand above me, casting their stony judgmental gazes down upon me. I wonder if they looked at the Scottsboro Boys and Al Gore, Jr., with the same disdain.