My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

him is as white as a marshmallow. He uses a single fingernail to scratch his nose. And in the corner, a couple hold a sleeping child in both their arms and rock it back and forth as if it were in a hammock. Add the Duran Duran song playing in Muzak, the out-of-date National Geographies strewn about the room, and the noisy motor of the drinking fountain, and this place is a real party.

Our hostess, the woman at the admitting desk, looks like Divine’ s stunt double, with her big perfect hair and cat-eyed makeup. Her

motionless forearms lay on the table like hunks of yeasty, rising bread dough. But her fingertips fly around the keyboard like manic hummingbirds. She looks like a huge thrift store mannequin that’s retaining water. I never want to come to one of her parties again.

“Age?” she asks, not looking at me. “Twenty-three.” “Height?” “Five-eight.” “Weight?”

“One forty-two.”

Eyes brown, hair brown, shit brown. Come on, lady, can’t you see I’m dying here? All you people care about is whether a guy has insurance anyway.

“What is your complaint?” she asks.

The pain strikes my lower abdomen like lightning. “Oh, my God!” I shriek, falling over. I can feel something explode inside of me.

“I’ve got to go,” my new former friend nervously tells the admitting gal. He beelines for the door.

“Wait!” she calls. “Are you family? Friend?”

“He’s got an insurance card in his wallet. I checked!” the guy yells over his shoulder before slipping out and into the night.

What’ swrong? Why is he fleeing the scene? Did he do something to me? We just had good old normal sex, as any two guys would. But now the fireworks are in my stomach, and they’re burning me up. As I start to pass out, I see a nurse and an intern running toward me.

When I wake, I hear a TV blaring the All My Children theme and see a curtain between me and my roommate. I discern I have a roommate because the scrim like curtain makes silhouettes of the bloated, large-headed creatures gathered round his bed, and when they raise their fat hands to gesture, or eat fried chicken (I can smell it), their hands appear to be webbed. When they move slightly and allow me a view of the silhouetted patient, all I see is a large stomach on a slab. The visitors standing at the foot of his bed, beyond the curtain, all have big, wide, matching bottoms, so I figure they’re all cursed with the same genetics and must be the poor sap’s family flesh from the lake bed.

One of the creatury shadows speaks. “That little gal is evil.” Ayvil.

“She sure is.” She shore iyuz.

The biggest shadow creature, the one who looks as if she’s got a spark arrester on her head, says, “Erica ain’t dumb. She’ll catch on.” Ercka aint doom. Shill kich own.

A voice escapes one of the butts at the end of the bed. “That guy ever wake up over there?”

The tremendous buttocks turns, I assume so that whatever is connected to them can look at me. Oh, God, get me out of here. I close my eyes, pretend I’m asleep. I’ve seen the bumper stickers stuck to tailgates of those dusty pickup tracks the moment I crossed over the state line: SECEDE! and us out OF TEXAS! I just don’t take the citizens of the Lone Star State to be the kind of folksy neighbors who will shower goodwill upon a Yankee homosexual who is probably hospitalized because he got knocked up by someone who wasn’t his own cousin. At best, they make jokes, the way they do about blacks and Mexicans. Nigras and Mescuns. And at worst, they’ll throw stones, read me scripture, and make me watch PTL with Jim and Tammy Faye.

I keep my eyes closed for at least another hour. All My Children ends; One Life to Live begins. A nurse comes in to check me, and even though I’m starving, I pretend to be asleep. Finally, the puffy lake people become bored with the schizophrenic Nicki/Vicki story line on One Life, so they decide to wallow back to the estuary.

I ring for the nurse. She appears. Nurse Carbonada. She’s a hundred years old and smells like broiled meat. “How are you feeling?” she wheezes.

“Fine.”

“Your girlfriend was in here this morning. Wants you to know she’ll be back this afternoon.”

My girlfriend? That guy who brought me here? Gee, Nurse

Carbonada is awfully hip. “Hungry?” she asks. “I guess. A little.”

“You’re restricted. I’ll bring in what I can.”

Before I can ask her what happened last night, she’s gone. There’ snothing lonelier than being in this hospital by myself and not knowing what circumstances brought me here. Strangely enough, I have the immediate longing for family. But who can I call? My father? Moot point. Although maybe he’s already here, watching all this from above. I can’t help but wonder if he loves me now, if he understands me in a way he couldn’t before. Is he some divine spirit who’s stopped passing judgment? He was good to me when I was a kid. Never physically affectionate, but always interactive. Showed me how to toss the tennis ball while serving. Bought me the best golf clubs and demonstrated the right wrist action when chipping onto the green. Taught me everything he’d learned of horses as a boy and bought me a wonderful gelding and schooled me into a knowledgeable equestrian, counseling me on form and helping me train my horse and enter horse shows.

I’ll never forget the night everything changed. We were seated around the dining room table, eating dinner, my mother rambling on about “those jakey Carters” and how the White House had become a “hillbilly retreat for poorly dressed beer drinkers” when I said I had something to say. And my mother joked, “If you’re going to announce that you’re dating Amy Carter, I forbid you to speak.” Which was absurd because Amy Carter was ten years old at