Preventative Medicine

I.

Yesterday on Chicago Avenue a man handed me a pink Easter egg. Inside I found a folded advertisement for a new kind of cellular phone.

At the entrance to the subway were five plastic eggs and a dozen paper ads. A red-haired boy kicked them and looked up, squinting, at his mother.

I was on my way to the aquarium. Some days I feel so waterlogged it’s nice to see a place that’s all water.

I didn’t make it there. Not because of Easter eggs, or the girl on the corner with pink dreadlocks selling package deals at a local salon. I felt like saying, ‘Yeah, it really looks like you use the salon.’ But I only thought that because it was funny, not because I meant it. Her hair looked fine. It was her teeth. They were yellow.

Not yellow like my teeth are dingy from nicotine, but yellow. Like, marigold.

It’s been bothering me since I saw it.

II.

They dyed the river green for St. Patrick’s Day. Before I saw it, I thought, ‘They’ve got to be kidding that it’s harmless,’ and, ‘Will the fish shit green?’
But after I saw it, I thought, ‘Give me the Emerald City.’

The skyscrapers along the river looked pale and thin, like Kate Moss, except made of marble, glass and steel. It was troubling.

III.

Last night I thought maybe I didn’t want to live anymore, so I ate frozen yogurt with chocolate fish in it. Since saltines cost $2 a tiny box I bought Goldfish crackers instead. This made me excruciatingly happy, for five seconds. The best joke I’d made in months. I tried to tell the checkout lady but I don’t think she thought it was funny.

IV.

If you take Xanax when you aren’t having an anxiety attack, the world slows down. ‘Yeah yeah,’ I know you’re saying, ‘Get on with it.’ But the thing is, it slows in a strange way. Like when you’re watching Wheel of Fortune, and Pat tells some 40-something patchy blonde mid-life crisis man wearing a tulip-purple shirt to spin the wheel. And he spins it harder than you’d think possible (and you wonder this whole time, how hard is it to spin that wheel? What if I were on the show? How would I measure up, spin-wise?), then it slows—slows—slows—and slows, tick tick tick you can hear the wheel tick tick tick, then finally stops. Unless you really hate the contestant, you hope it doesn’t land on ‘Bankrupt.’

That’s what it’s like. Xanax when you don’t really need it.

V.

I think the times that you don’t really need it can be the times you need it the most.

VI.

For instance, before I buy the frozen yogurt and goldfish crackers, thinking, ‘The world is artificial, Asa doesn’t love me, I forget how to do what I’m good at, I’m lonely, and if I told my doctor she’d make me take Paxil, and that’ll make me gain more weight than this food I’m buying, and I don’t want to be force-happied but I don’t want to feel this way.’ Et bloody cetera.

Thinking this way doesn’t always make my pulse turn into a skier going downhill, but it might and I know what that’s like.

This is:
Preventative.
Medicine.

VII.

If you want to know the truth, for a month I’ve been medicating myself back and forth between Ultram and Xanax. Ultram for days when I just feel moderately bad, and Xanax for days when I really feel I might fuck up, otherwise.

VIII.

Fucking up might mean: a guy calls me.

A guy calling me isn’t like a guy calling other girls, because I’m not Really Interested In That Way.

We met at the one party I’ve been to in the last two years. And talked about Mahler. He hummed a phrase that was stalking him (music doesn’t haunt, it stalks) but I was drunk, he was tipsy, we were on the porch where everyone went to smoke and it was noisy so all I could say was ‘I’m pretty sure that doesn’t come from symphonies 3,5,6,7 or 9.’ Which left 1,2,4 and 8. With which I was less familiar.

But later he called and said it was symphony number 1, for sure.

I made sure to burn a copy of Mahler’s Symphony #1 at my parents’ house. Then I left a message for him. Because I’ve got the CD.

So he calls.

‘Hi this is ______.’

I say, ‘Hi _____ I thought you were my neighbor.’

‘What?’

‘I mean I thought you were my neighbor calling. I’m glad you’re not my neighbor.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, I’m sure you’re a great neighbor, but I’m…’

By this time the conversation is already terribly askew.

It goes on like that, then finally we get off the phone; he says, ‘I’ll call you next week and we can do something.’ He doesn’t.

IX.

Fucking up could also mean: dropping my $300 camera on the floor and breaking it.

I did this last week.

Grandmother used to say, about children: ‘They go through phases of having The Dropsies.’

I don’t qualify as a child anymore, but these days, if I don’t Watch It, things just slip from my hands and break before my eyes. In a way, it’s remarkable.

Watching It is why I have to take Xanax and Ultram.

You know how kids say, about their teachers and mothers: ‘She’s got eyes on the back of her head?’

I’m trying to have eyes on the back of my head, so I see what I’m about to do and stop myself before it’s too late.

X.

See, today, I didn’t take a pill right when I woke up, like I do most days.

Yesterday? How I felt waterlogged? It was my pill that helped me carry myself outside and at least attempt to reach the aquarium, though before I made it to the bus stop something happened to me and I had to come home.

At least I saw the weird girl with the teeth, and those Easter eggs.
Today all I did was flop around in my bed, one side to another. I imagine my mouth looked like that of a fish, gasping. Glug, glug. My skin, dry—felt like fins.

‘Dorsal,’ I thought to myself. ‘Watch out, shark.’

A joke dried up as a beached whale.

I used all my energy to haul myself into the bathroom every hour, whether or not I had to pee. If I didn’t have to go I’d sit on the toilet and stare at strange light filtering through the plastic shower curtain. At least it was a different view than the one from my bed.

How does light filter through plastic?

I wondered if that’s what fish feel like when in an East facing room sun shatters against an aquarium wall and refracts on iridescent marbles at the bottom of the tank.

Watch It.

XI.

I didn’t take a pill yesterday because this is my stock right now:

Xanax, 7
Ultram, 10

This is upsetting. My doctor gave me these prescriptions less than a month ago. Ultram for cramps, Xanax for anxiety. And she said, ‘I’m not going to write you another prescription for Xanax in a month because it’s terribly addictive. You won’t thank me if you go into withdrawal. If you still feel like you need it in a month, we’ll put you on Paxil.’

Xanax can be broken in half, so technically I can take half a pill instead of one, but Ultram doesn’t budge. You have to take the whole damn thing.

Besides, taking half a Xanax instead of a whole one? It’s like the beer you get at really dumpy dives—the kind with peeling wallpaper and greasy condom machines in the bathroom, where someone has drawn nipples on the shape of the woman on the LADIES sign, and an erect penis on the man of MEN. Do you follow me? And the kind of dive where the owner doesn’t bother to put up new LADIES and MEN signs but leaves those up because he somehow believes it enhances the spirit of his place.

Half a Xanax is like a quarter cup of beer mixed with water. Unless you’re a sissy or a four-year-old, it won’t dull any of your nerves or settle you down, let alone make you feel that pleasant, cares-to-the-wind bliss you get from a whole pill.

XII.

Honestly I’m making it sound better than it is. A whole pill—well, I told you before, it’s like watching Wheel-Of-Fortune.

And it is.

But don’t even start to think I enjoy it.

I enjoy it in the way that I enjoy not getting hit by a bus on a Sunday afternoon when little girls walk by licking ice cream cones and they don’t push of the scoops of chocolate onto the dirt, accidentally, with their tongues.

Or the way I enjoy seeing a cat make it safely across the street even though a teenaged boy at the wheel does all he can to hit her.

Or advancing film to take the next snapshot, just to hear the shutter clamp down and make the film remember something I know I won’t, without the picture.

XIII.

Ultram is something else entirely.

Ultram and Xanax are like your mother when she was six years old and in Catholic school and your mother after she’d left the church at age 55—not the same thing at all.

Ultram is for those moderately bad days; it’s like having a gingerly old grandmother for tea with you who afterwards asks if she can put lotion on your feet, then gives you a foot massage.

Don’t ask me if I’m a sicko.

My mother knows this old woman who lives here—she’s in her late 80s, still up and about, which is more than I can say for myself—and told me to invite her over for tea. My mother believes me to be a Desperate Woman, alone in a city with how many people (please don’t answer).

Mother even sent me a pink teapot to match my china; she was that serious.
So I sent this woman an invitation on nice stationery with a rose-stamped seal over the lip of the envelope, and she came. For all the brightness I affected she saw right through and said ‘Give me your feet,’ like I was Jesus for Chrissakes and she washed them for me out of a pan with hot water and she lotioned and touched them like they were gold.

Ultram is tenderness, a gentle, timid girl. Xanax is a heavy-duty wench who pins you on the floor and says, ‘Now then, let’s get down to business.’

XIV.

If I’d been doing my job, which at all times is to Watch It, then this morning, I wouldn’t have slept late accidentally (but Xanax at bedtime makes me sleep so long in the morning, it couldn’t be helped) and I would’ve gotten up at 8.30 to take another pill, gone back to bed, and gotten up several hours later able to brush my hair.

Brush my hair and go for a walk around the block.

I could’ve even stopped in the pet store to thumb doggy chins, squawk at parrots and make faces at fish.

As I told you, that isn’t what happened at all.

Instead I was my very own fish, peeing on the hour, just in case I really couldn’t get up later—I may be bad off, but I still don’t want to piss in my own bed.

XV.

A dirty bird shits in his own nest.

Who do you think I am, anyway?

XVI.

At 7.19 this next new morning I take another pill.

It’s a blonde day outside so I open my blinds. I lift the window, something I can’t always do because it sticks when humidity’s high, and find it’s also a gooseflesh day.

By nine I’m able to drink tea and dress.

Do you have any idea how it looks to see a skirt against a thigh when you’d thought, My God I’ll never be able to put clothes on again for as long as I live?

XVII.

One of my biggest fears is, I’ll turn into one of the Subway Crazies.

I worry that because I’ve thought I wouldn’t be able to dress myself or go out into the world, one day I’ll put on every piece of clothing I own and end up on a train that circles and circles the city, getting off at the last stop and crossing the tracks to get on the returning train.

I’ll start to smell after a while, my hair will grow matted and turn grey prematurely. I’ll notice people saying ‘Poor Thing’ or laughing at me behind their hands.

Or worse.

I won’t notice, and will start murmuring things to my thighs about plastic, and Sen. Jesse Helms, and all of the things in this world that don’t make sense.

What if one day this happens to me? How can I know it won’t?

I’m guarding against it with my life.

XVIII.

There is a man who walks around and around the block, day and night, screaming DANGER!
He waits a moment, then yells WATCH YOURSELF.

XIX.

I remember this one time—I was a little girl then—the neighbors invited me over to play. They had a Slip ‘n Slide set up in the front yard, a long yellow sheet of plastic laid over tree roots and part of the sidewalk.

Three little girls and boys shrieked with pleasure, hurling themselves over and over onto the slide. Every time I did it, feigning pleasure, my ribs whacked concrete and I felt my body thrash over roots.

How can people not notice these things?

They were children, so I can maybe excuse them, but adults do it all the time.
I mean, when the day after, when the bruise is there, how can they not acknowledge it?

XX.

Did you know that koi (those fancy Japanese goldfish) have some of the most toxic pee of all fish? That if you don’t buy a filter for your tank, the koi will eventually poison themselves with their own waste?

I found out after all of mine died.

The guy at the fish store felt so sorry for me he gave me one fish and a filter. He said, in broken English,

‘Better luck now time.’



I hope to God it is.