Diary of My Health

Rx C527562

No refills remaining

April 2. Homer, my UPS guy, drops off three cartons of Medco pharmaceuticals. Homer is an okay guy if you steer him clear of religion and all talk of hell, but I slipped up today and got him going. "Hell?" he says. "You're looking at bad shit before your feet hit the ground, before you even get there. Man, they got these close-quarter holding cells at the farthest edge of the earth, little concrete anterooms where they soften up the condemned before transit. Bones are crushed. Sinners are pounded, gassed, drawn, quartered, lashed up and down. Then you're deloused with carbolic acid, and all the while they play Grateful Dead albums. Have you ever really listened to a Grateful Dead album? Actually listened? It's only the beginning! Charon, a terrifying monster in his own right, proceeds to ferry the doomed across the river Styx. Weeping and wailing like a pack of howling wolves. Begging forgiveness, gnashing teeth. Are you with me?" he says with a celestial fire in his eyes. "I don't think so, Thomas. I don't think you're paying close attention, but you should because it gets much worse. Up here hedonists like yourself frolic and sin as they have for centuries, pushovers for Satan and his lies! Hell is no cartoon; it's a real place. Cross the river, baby, and you got H-E-double hockey sticks for all of time. Abandon hope all ye who enter! First thing, they roast you on a spit while Satan reads you the rules and regulations. He's a fast talker with that split tongue, but still, it takes nine days to complete the job, and all this time you're roasting on a skewer. Once the grave implications of your situation sink in, demons cool you off with liquid nitrogen and send you out to mop and wax a football field, side by side with the likes of Joseph Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. When that's done, 30 centuries later, you get five minutes to write a 60-page term paper with a pencil nub or a melting beige Crayola crayon before some other hideous torment." Along with my pharmaceutical boxes, Homer picks up a smaller package from his hand truck. He looks at it and shakes his head in dismay. "Thomas, you are still getting packages from Playboy magazine. Why do I stand here wasting my breath?" Homer glances at his watch. Thank God he's running behind. He hops back in his brown truck and peels rubber out of my driveway. I carry three boxes of drugs to my little pharmacy just off the kitchen and begin to restock the shelves. Okay, what have we got here?

Box one: a. Lamictal, Neurontin and Klonopin for epilepsy. (I hit my head on a rock the first time I went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.) b. Elavil, Prozac, Mellaril, Tegretol and lithium for bipolar disorder. (Take lithium for a while and you're a Haitian zombie, no Niagara Falls pioneer.)

Box two: a. Six bottles of Humalog insulin in bubble-wrapped cool packs. I store those in the fridge. b. Blood-sugar strips. A brittle diabetic, I have to test 15 times a day at 80 cents a strip. c. Glucose tablets for hypoglycemia. d. Glucometer batteries. e. Lancets, alcohol swabs, insulin reservoirs and soft-set infusion kits.

Box three: a. Lipitor, cholesterol. b. Atacand, blood pressure. c. Nitroglycerin cream for cyanotic toes. d. Provigil for narcolepsy. e. Crap for my sleep apnea ventilator (two blow-dryers up the nostrils work just as well).

April 6. I read the Bible today. I don't know where Homer comes up with this shit. The only part of the hell scenario I can confirm is the "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Jesus, I already gnash my teeth. That's why I wear a plastic tooth guard at night.

April 7. Is it just me, or am I correct in thinking that the only time people have any semblance of fun is when they're on dope or hard liquor? I was a little kid the last time I had natural fun. Aurora, Illinois, July 25, 1954. The top of the ninth, White Sox vs. Boston, the first game of a doubleheader, a partly cloudy, cool day, 26,068 fans, Jack Harshman on the hill mowing them down. Now with an 0 and 2 count, he shakes off the catcher. I am across the street at Pike's Dairy, throwing waterlogged baseballs, three pounds each, against a rusty milk truck when my mother calls me in to put on my pair of wool pants and go to church. I am thence sucked into a vortex of darkest gloom from which I've never been released.

April 14. Los Angeles. A table reading of my fifth film script. Not a good time for a Crohn's disease flare-up. I tough it out with butt cheeks so tight that coal could be squeezed into diamonds. The reading goes badly. In a CAA men's room, butt cheeks give way to Hershey-squirt diarrhea. Back in my hotel room, more of the same. On the three-hour plane ride home, a botched attempt at sneaking a fart leads to an episode of explosive diarrhea. I disembark (without underwear) and, in the safety of home, endure the usual agony while I wait for the Lomotil to kick in. I failed to stuff the medication into my portable pharmacy. It was the grave omission of a shock-treatment memory-loss fool. On top of everything else, the script gets shelved.

April 16. I've been out of sorts lately, flat-out depressed. That's why I decided to pick up my health journal again and record my last days. Sometimes I want to eat a quarter pound of barbiturates and various supplementary poisons, chased with absinthe, and then relax to Rammstein in the closed garage with my Citroën 2CV full throttle.

April 21. Does an ant have a soul? Do good ants upgrade into a higher life-form? A lobster, say? Endless reincarnations suck. Every female I have ever met tells me she used to be Cleopatra. I was a yak tender of no distinction living on the steppes of Mongolia, where there was nothing to eat except clay.

April 25. Most Americans don't know it, but noise is a leading cause of strokes and heart attacks. People get used to noise, but it kills them all the same. A person in an inner city can sleep only to the lullaby of sirens and gunfire. At five in the morning I hear fucking birds chirping, crows cawing, while a woodpecker tattoos the aluminum rain gutter just outside my bedroom. My Dutch neighbor Elsa says somebody has been vomiting outside her window at five in the morning. It's probably her neighbor, who used to attend two AA meetings a day. "Why would someone vomit outside?" she asks me. "It makes a mess. You could just puke in the toilet and flush it." Elsa says she was about to go outside to investigate but saw a large wolf looking at her through her sliding glass door. 'Thom, he just wouldn't quit staring at me."

April 29. The UPS guy knows I don't exactly work, so he asks if I can drop by in the morning to help move his wife's grand piano up to the third floor. "While we're in the attic, I'd like to move my anvil collection from upstairs down to the basement. If there's time, I want to knock down a chimney. Bring a respirator." If I piss Homer off, he'll throw my pharmaceutical shipments off a bridge into the river. The fish will begin doing odd things. They could grow feet and walk around town like thugs. Who knows?

April 30. Goddamn it. My fucking back is killing me, and I squashed my thumb trying to haul two anvils at once. No "under the spreading chestnut tree," just a busted thumb.

May 4. Killer back pain.

June 6. Oh, for Christ's sake, not only is my back still killing me, I've got a whopping summer cold!

June 7. Raw throat, fever and nasal congestion. A seven on the Thom Jones Misery Index.

June 8. Cold worse. I have to lay all day.

June 10. Canker sore on right tongue edge. My tongue looks like elephant leather.

June 11. Now a cough. I knew this would happen.

June 12. Took 500 mikes of mescaline and am examining the crevice in my tongue when it suddenly turns into a Komodo dragon and chases me out into the yard. I come down at midnight and can't find my tongue. Dope paranoia forces me to hide under the bed, where I discover a box turtle with halitosis. I come down a little and carefully creep downstairs, secure all door and window locks, double-check same and then watch a Pee-wee Herman flick on HBO, all the while standing on the balls of my feet, filled with terror and great apprehension.

June 13. Find tongue under the Citroën. Superglue it back on.

June 14. After stocking the shelves of my pharmacy I make for the health food store to pick up a few bottles of vitamins and snake oil remedies:

a. Vitamins: complete 50-milligram Bs, vitamin C, folic acid, dissolve-under-tongue B12, pantothenic acid, vitamin E (natural mixed tocopherols), biotin and vitamin D. b. Minerals: selenium, calcium citrate, magnesium, biocitric copper, chromium and Kreb's "Transported by the Fuel of Life" zinc. c. Antioxidants: alpha lipoic acid, lutein, lycopene, grape seed oil, pine bark extract, Q10, Essential Greens 3000, curcumin, etc. d. Herbs: saw palmetto, hoodia, pau d'arco (I can't remember what it's for), hawthorn berry, e. Amazon River tropical frog skin.

(continued on page 120)Diary(continued from page 91)

Have I already mentioned that my memory is shot? I don't remember.

June 15. As a kid I experienced instances of natural fun whenever the Gypsies came to town. My grandmother saved the burlap bags potatoes came in and each year gave them to the Gypsies, who in turn sharpened all her butcher knives and fixed a coffeepot with a broken handle. What a life! Roving caravans, dancing around a campfire to accordion and violin music. Crystal-ball visions of the future. One of the Gypsy elders took a shine to me and invited me to join up.

"Join up? Tonight? Let me think about it. I'm only five years old."

"Yes. Escape the ball and chain and come with us. It's a slacker lifestyle. The women do all the work."

I didn't go. I should have. Every time I think of it I kick myself in the ass.

My grandmother paid the fortune-teller 50 cents to tell her where she misplaced a cigar box filled with cash. The fortune-teller hit the nail on the head. It was a two-for-one deal. While my grandmother retrieved the cigar box, the Gypsy told me I would be jailed four times, fired from a number of jobs, mental hospitals, ambulances called, squad cars and ultimately 22 years as a custodian. Boy, did she ever hit the nail on the head.

June 16. Cough much worse. Kaff, kaff, kaff, damn! It's not the cough of acute bronchitis, which I have experienced seven times. It's a dry cough, which rules out pneumonia and cystic fibrosis. It's not lung cancer, with its telltale wheeze, lobar atelectasis with mediastinal shift, diminished expansion, dullness of percussion and loss of breath with pain and loss of weight. It could be Hand-Schuller-Christian disease. You will have a dry cough when you get that.

June 17. Dizzy. Head spinning, eyes whirling like pinwheels, smoke coming out of my ears. It feels like getting off the carnival Rock-O-Plane after a corn dog, a jumbo birch beer and a haystack of pink cotton candy.

June 18. Woke up okay. Blood pressure 115/64. Pulse 57. Blood sugar 89. The fever is down, but the cough dogs me. What if it is lung cancer? Fuck. Had to lie on floor and breathe into a brown paper bag.

June 20. Eat a bowl of alfalfa to bolster my waning immune system. Man, I'll never do that again. Decide to just fuck everything and ingest a large dose of ketamine. Paralyzed, I lie on the floor and watch my soul leave my body and fly to remote galaxies in outer space. Get real scared and try to reel my soul in. A bad scene ensues. I am chased by a fleet of spaceships from the planet Mongo. Captain Torch at the wheel of the lead rocket ship. (Man, he hasn't aged well.) He shakes his fist at me, and I flip him the bird. Then I turn invisible, which is really draining. I bump into the Hubble Space Telescope and bruise my hip smashing the auxiliary lens into a thousand pieces.

June 22. I wake up with three # # # floaters in my eye. When the nurse hands the phone to my ophthalmologist I overhear him saying, "What's wrong with poor Thom today?" I say I think little elves are in my eye typing on the back of my retina with an old portable Smith Corona typewriter. "Like with a faded ribbon," I tell him. When I explain this to him over the phone, this is what he says: "Look, Mr. Jones. You call me drunk at two in the morning. You call in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. How many times have I found you sitting on the curb in front of my office as I drive in to work? Before I put the car into park you're banging on my window with some new bullshit symptom. I don't want to be your doctor anymore. Don't even come close to my office. I'm filing a restraining order against you, and I'm having my phone number changed."

June 28. I just noticed how yellow my teeth are getting. I brush them with Comet for a gleaming white smile.

June 29. Gums hurt. Scurvy? I eat four lemons and get a sour stomach. I take a Tagamet, Nexium and drink an entire $2.95 bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

July 1. Constipated. Respite from diarrhea caused by Crohn's disease, finally.

July 5. Insomnia.

July 6. Insomnia. Completely hagged out.

July 7. I just can't sleep. Lay in bed and worry.

July 8. Toss, turn and mash pillows all night. Insomnia.

July 9. Will it never end? "The healthy man," writes E.M. Cioran, "only dabbles in insomnia: He knows nothing of those who would give a kingdom for an hour of unconscious sleep, those as terrified by the sight of a bed as they would be of a torture rack."

July 12. Twelve nights and not even a wink.

July 14. Haggard beyond belief. There is a variant of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) that induces fatal insomnia. Dead in four to 12 months! Boy, I've eaten my share of burgers.

July 19. What if I were to fly to Africa, to a heavily infected tsetse fly zone, and contract sleeping sickness to counterbalance my affliction? Book a flight to Africa.

July 26. Try to read Ulysses and fall into a five-day coma. Why didn't I think of that in the first place? I feel great!

July 27. Depressed again. Antidepressants should be called what they really are: hammers of despair. You can't sleep, you can't fuck, and your head feels like it contains 17 pounds of aluminum.

Labor Day. Tossing a football with my brother, I jump to catch a high pass and feel a lightning bolt shoot through my arm. Shoulder hurts so bad I can only tightly squeeze my elbow to my rib cage. Can't put on a shirt by myself.

September 5. Frozen shoulders are so rare, most people seldom hear of them. Twenty percent of the diabetic population gets them. A frozen shoulder is no day at the beach.

September 6. Insomnia again. The same old routine.

September 7. Born to suffer.

September 12. Acupuncture for shoulder. No go, nothing, zip. Just a big waste of time.

September 14. Rolfed by some Wavy Gravy chick who talked aromatherapy, e.g. the catfish flower.

September 16. Deep-tissue massage. Yet another flop.

September 20. The orthopedic surgeon attempts to break the shoulder capsule adhesions under anesthesia. "I couldn't do it," he says later. "I thought I was going to break your arm. Go to a pain clinic."

September 24. Pain clinic dispenses narcotics. "Not enough to get you high," the nurse says with a smile. Meanwhile, "the shoulder will only get worse. There is an osteopath you might try."

October 9. Facedown on the treatment table. Dr. Coors, osteopath and Spanish inquisitor, pulls my arm mercilessly. There are loud pops as he breaks the adhesions in the shoulder capsule. The pain is so bad I think my hair will catch fire. Coors says, "Come back tomorrow."

October 11. Facedown on the table I bite a hole through the Naugahyde, swallow a rusty spring and three wads of horsehair stuffing. Coors says, "We're beginning to get somewhere. We're making progress."

October 24. Lying in bed the evening after my third treatment I suddenly notice something. My God! For the first time in months my shoulder doesn't hurt. Ecstatic for a moment. Then I realize there's a disaster I'm currently unaware of that will announce itself with a thunderclap.

October 25. Boy, I sure hope I don't get bird flu.

October 26. Shoulder a lot better. Nothing to report except a hangnail on my anvil-crushed thumb. By and by it begins to feel like a cobra bite.

October 27. Slept until four P.M. Thumb still bad. Why are we here? Just to suffer?

October 29. Elsa calls and says she saw the wolf again, hunkered down behind her woodshed. "It's an evil beast, Thom. I am so afraid. Why won't he leave me alone?"

October 30. Prostate trouble and a searing pain in my urethra. I take an OxyContin and soak in a hot bath to relax.

November 1. Elsa tells me the five A.M. puker is still at it.

November 2. Took some Advil for my thumb. The Advil ignites a nuclear fireball in my stomach. Heartburn. The Channel 7 weatherman said there would be a meteor shower tonight. Outside for an hour and all I see are fizzlers. As a result, I get a sore neck and have to dig through the garage to find my cervical collar.

November 5. Elsa caught the dawn puker. Her immediate neighbor "just couldn't take it anymore."

November 9. I spring out of bed at noon, determined to accomplish great deeds. I tackle a raft of dishes, and through the kitchen window I see the farmer who lives behind me chucking fallen branches from his side of the fence over to mine. With him is the gray Norwegian elkhound Elsa has mistaken for a wolf. It is medium-size, about 50 pounds and wagging its tail to beat the band. I thank the farmer for the logs and tell him that with all that lumber I can finally build a meth lab. He looks at me and says, "You can kiss my ass!"

November 12. My diabetic toenails have evolved into hooves. Square them away with a rat-tail file.

November 15. Decide to use the business-class plane tickets I bought to Africa during my insomnia phase. They cost a small fortune; best I use them. All day packing. Wide-eyed and fearful. Another ghastly trip. What was I thinking?

November 16. Dawn limo to Sea-Tac, five hours to New York, two-hour layover, then an all-night flight to Heathrow, nine hours to Nairobi, drinking shooters. Arrive drunk. A pickpocket lifted my dummy wallet with my old driver's license, an expired library card and two bucks. Thank God for money belts, though mine was purchased during the Jimi Hendrix era. The psychedelic colors will be a big hit in Zambia.

November 17. Hitch a ride to the tsetse fly zone on the back of a sorghum truck. I arrive with my face pasted with red dust. Prostate trouble, a blowtorch in my dick, all 15 inches of it. Hop off the truck in a mud-and-wattle village. No hotel, no B&B, no TV, no McDonald's. Nothing.

November 18. Late afternoon. Fucking Christ, is it ever hot! I rent a room in the back of the OD Macaroni Factory.

November 19. I hate Africa.

November 20. I dug out a flea that had somehow burrowed under my thumbnail. There is a small fan over at the button factory. I rent a stall there. Mealie meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At least you don't get caught in a menu quandary.

November 21. The night watchman introduces me to Charles, a university student from Ethiopia who quickly makes himself at home in the stall across from my own. Charles shares a bucket of beer with me. In the light of a kerosene lantern we play cards all night. Lions roar in the distant jungle.

November 23. Bucket-of-beer hangover persists. Charles constantly sprays himself with DEET "Tsetse flies, man. Can't be too careful."

November 24. Drunk on palm wine at nine A.M. I buy a fish, oranges and a banana at the outdoor market. While the saleswoman bundles my purchase, I drop her baby and momentarily pass out on the road. Thankfully, the baby broke my fall.

November 25. Tonight at dusk, as I walk back from the market, I step off the road to take a leak and, forgetting I am in Africa, disturb a jumping pit viper (Porthidium nummifera). It's a sturdy, short-tempered snake. This one strikes with such force, its husky body leaves the ground. It shoots past me faster than a left jab and sails deep into the roadside undergrowth. I pick up its Bolivian passport and wallet. Inside there's a picture of the snake's wife and children. There is also a letter. "My darling Estella, Africa is very bad. I have lost weight living on mouses. I miss joure shovel-shaped head, joure hort-shaped face, you gleaming fangs. Do you miss me at all? Why have you run off with Kenny Stabler?"

November 26. Oh God, I promise. I swear I will never drink palm wine again. Save me!

November 29. Venture into the bush with Charles and a new acquaintance, Sylvester. Chased by warthogs.

December 2. My stomach hurts low down. Sylvester says it's roundworms. "Eat a cigarette and it will die," he says. I wolf down a Pall Mall and become sicker than a dog.

December 3. I void a nine-inch tapeworm. That's odd. No wonder I'm so thin. Sylvester wants me to sponsor him to America. "Sell tapeworms to college girls," he says. "They can eat all they want and stay thin. Make us millionaires."

December 11. Charles takes a Magic Marker and points a stake west to Seattle. The sign reads, Home Sweet Home Thomas. I doubt I will live to see Seattle again. Another warthog runs through the village at dusk.

December 14. How come everything feels so much better when you're lying down? I'm really growing to love my little pallet at the button factory.

December 16. Sylvester won't lay off the tapeworm scheme. Now he's got Charles hot for the idea. I say, "American women, no matter how fat, won't swallow a thick white worm." "Yes they will," says Sylvester. "They will! What do you know anyhow?" Charles pipes in, "No worm to swallow, just a small vacuum-packed worm capsule. Just the ticket, man."

December 17. Charles drives me to a three-hut village packed with victims of sleeping sickness. They all look pale, like Michael Jackson. They aren't so much sleeping as they are "out of it."

December 19. The button-factory watchman tells me Charles and Sylvester made off with my passport. My mini-pharmacy? "Long gone, man. Fat man Jimi Hendrix belt gone too." I fall to the ground and kick at it and beat it with both fists. I chip a tooth on a rock. Send me a helicopter, God, and I swear I will never harbor a mean thought for the rest of my life.

December 23. Home just in time for Christmas. Three days in the Slumber-king riding out a case of sandfly disease.

December 24. Christmas Eve. A stabbing pain in my foot. I hobble around bowlegged all day, like a busting-bronco cowpoke. I wrap Christmas presents. I can't get to the Slumberking fast enough. Beyond awful. I wonder what it's like to die. I'm sick all the time, but the final agonies must be worse. Yet so often I see old people smiling. Putzing around their yard, smiling. Horseshoes and lawn bowling between chemotherapy, and still smiling. What is with that? They croak and an influx of new ones rushes in to replace them. On the plane home I saw a woman eight months pregnant, and she had a big-ass smile on her face. Was she just putting on a good show? Was she really thinking, "Why did I ever fuck that ex-con mentally retarded lowlife? Having this kid of his is going to hurt like hell, and I'll be a walking stretch mark. On top of it all I'll have a screaming kid on my hands night and day, living on welfare the next 20 years while the old man luxuriates in the penitentiary without a worry in the world. Man, could I ever use another hit of methedrine."

December 25. Birds chirping. The distant sound of puking in the bushes. Merry Christmas!

December 29. All I do is sleep. Jesus, I used to have time to do things, but now life revolves around Crohn's disease, prostate trouble, heartburn, epilepsy, a hundred million problems.

January 27. Feel deathly ill. I spend the entire day on the Slumberking. Every once in a while I have to sit up and look at the callus on my foot.

January 28. I pick at the callus with a small knife. The pain is unbearable. I can't get anything done. I just hobble from one room to the next looking for stuff I have misplaced.

January 29. A sharp triangle of glass begins to emerge from the callus. I finally dig it out with my knife. It is a dime-size piece of amber beer-bottle glass. My senior year in high school I was wading in Aurora's Mastodon Lake and stepped on something sharp. The foot bled copiously. The next day red streaks were working their way up my leg. My doctor gave me antibiotics. From then on, touching that spot with a fingertip sent me flying through the ceiling. It was a lot like stepping on a punji stick. Glass doesn't show up on X-rays. I had to order custom-made shoes from plaster of paris molds. The shoes looked like Frankenstein boots. People ridiculed them openly. I learned how to find normal shoes that would accommodate the sore spot. After 42 years the glass works its way out. Amazing!

February 5. No matter how you cut it, it hurts to die. Asphyxiation is usually involved. With type 1 diabetes I will most likely have a stroke or fatal heart attack. Get out of the easy chair to take a whizzer and "Ahhhh!" Ka-plop. Two weeks later firemen will break inside trying to find the cloying odor that has the neighborhood up in arms. 'Jesus, will you look at that? His head is bigger than a pumpkin! I wonder how they will ever squash him into a coffin."

So there you have it. The aeons of nonexistence, birth, Shakespeare's seven ages of man (which boil down to years of suffering in various forms), dreams that seldom come true and just enough good stuff to keep you going. Then death and the foreverness of all eternity, painless and carefree. No more problems. No demonic tortures. Just nothing, pure and simple. How can you top that?

Here lies Thom Jones Rip

He packed 2,000 years of Agony

Into the Substandard 62

I creep downstairs, secure all door and window locks and watch a Pee-wee Herman flick on HBO, all while standing on the balls of my feet.