The Walking Man (14 page)

"I need you cut out a chunk of my ass and ship it to an anti-venom lab in Africa," I said.

Smitty laughed. "What constitutes a chunk?"

"In baking terms, I'm pretty sure it would be about a tablespoon."

"I'm a felon caber tosser," Smitty said. "I'm not a doctor. Plus, how is anyone going to slice a tablespoon out of your ass without Nurse Judy II finding out?"

"You need to take me to Hal's house so his nephews can stab me."

"They stab you, and then I extract the chunk."

"Exactly. It's the perfect plan. We blame the children."

"I suppose you'll want me to stitch you up, too."

"That would be nice."

"I'll do it," Smitty said. "Why not…"

"Thank you," I said. "Want to know why you need to extract a chunk o' me?"

"Trust me. I don't." Smitty smiled.

The following Sunday, we visited Hal. My nephews, Frank and Oscar, were now teenagers and in rare form, thus quick to address their age-old desire to confirm my painless state by repeatedly sticking their new Swiss Army knives into my ass. As a result of my nephews' relatively innocent attack, Smitty had a variety of wounds to work from, so when we returned to Room 302, he was able to easily extract a tablespoon of my flesh.

"Dig deep and make sure you get some fibers," I said to Smitty.

"Are you sure you can't feel this?" Smitty asked as he cut into my ass with a sterilized X-acto knife.

"Feel what?" I responded with a smile.

After digging out a full tablespoon of buttocks, I instructed Smitty to put my flesh into a blender I'd just purchased from Amazon.com, add a half a cup of corn oil, and "whip" until consistent. I called the resultant blend a "Me Smoothie." Smitty called it "Muscle Soup."

Smitty won the naming war; after a couple minutes of blending, he poured one ounce of Muscle Soup into a tempered glass vial and put the balance in a Tupperware cup, which he then placed in my mini-fridge. Next, Smitty drove the Muscle Soup to the FedEx office in Shyshire for next-day shipment to Melvin Pliskin, who was anxious to start processing my Muscle Soup, being in possession of a contract that provided him with a significant time-based incentive.

Seven days after receiving my muscle-oil solution, Melvin shipped back the first batch of Anti-me. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, as instructed, Melvin had identified the serum as "African Mist," a perfume for a man who wanted to smell like
The Sands of the Kalahari
.

Being a criminal and working in a hospital, made stealing a syringe supply child's play for Rodrigo, who only requested twenty bucks for committing the misdemeanor. Later, realizing he had committed the unforgiveable sin of undercharging, Rodrigo insisted on fifty bucks to inject Anti-me into my buttocks claiming the exposure to "my hairy ass, my hairy ass" would cause permanent psychological damage.

There was no instant reaction to my first injection of Anti-me, but the next morning I felt funny. I had no idea what it was until Nurse Judy II entered my room to change my diaper and screamed, "Oh my God! Praise Jesus!"

"What is it?" I asked.

"Praise be the Lord," the increasingly excited Nurse Judy said.

"God dammit, Nurse Judy, What is it?"

"Praise Jesus!" a now blushing Nurse Judy said. "You have an erection, and…it's a big one!"

Chapter Nine

Killing Betty

As news of my massive woody spread, a line gathered outside my door as every nurse in the hospital stopped by to assess my "situation"—in the name of science, of course. Having been dormant for forty years, my penis was apparently proud of its sudden inflation for it refused to return to a flaccid state without first being treated with ice packs. Not wanting the hospital's medical professionals to discover my Anti-me serum, I claimed a J.Lo dance I witnessed on MTV was responsible for my inexplicable arousal. No doubt having experienced a similar reaction upon watching the gyrations of the curvaceous diva, the male members of the hospital's staff concurred with my assessment; so luckily, a formal investigation was avoided.

Sadly, beyond stimulating my long dormant member, the first batch of Anti-me did not return feeling to any other part of my body. Nonetheless, I was thrilled that my initial foray into drug production had produced a result, albeit a competitor to Viagra.

My perceived progress inspired me to "thoroughly" analyze the results of my first trial. I concluded that, to produce effective antibodies, I needed to pretreat my Muscle Soup with a substance capable of isolating the neurotoxin responsible for my condition, which I had nicknamed Betty, after a neighborhood girl who had once lifted me off my feet by my hair.

My guess was Betty would ultimately kill herself by generating a destructive antibody via my Anti-me process. To test my theory, I needed to break the bond between Betty and my nerve cells. I figured this might be tricky because Betty had to be freed without being damaged. But overall, the procedure sounded simple enough to me.

Isolate my neurotoxin, a.k.a. Betty.

Send some to Melvin.

Inject Betty into a horse's butt.

Collect the antibodies.

Inject the antibodies into my butt.

The antibodies kill Betty.

I spend the remainder of my life dancing with Maria.

I figured it would take me a couple months to work out the details: ignorance being the cornerstone of hope.

Fifty trials and a year into finding my cure, I began to understand the complexities associated with my effort as expensive lab tests revealed Betty was a complex protein. The testing was conducted at an "advanced imaging lab" in Boston. The facility was associated with Massachusetts General Hospital. It had an electron microscope and modeling software that could render protein images in three dimensions. After viewing several images, to me, proteins looked like randomly assembled Tinker Toy structures. Smitty concluded they looked like "jagged spaghetti."

My hopes were formally crushed when Smitty and I travelled to Boston to receive our first lab report. Smitty had arranged the visit, telling Juliette Dritch he was taking me to the
Freedom Trail
. The scientist who presented the results was named Seymour Giffs.

For an ultra-nerd, Seymour came across as surprisingly normal. There was no sign of Asperger's. There was a Red Sox pennant on his wall. And his desk had pictures of his wife and kiddies.

Seymour informed me, without an ounce of emotion, that Betty was a massive protein that contained over twenty tangled polypeptide chains.

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"Not good," Seymour told me. "Only God could figure out how this baby works."

Eager to promote his superiority, the confident imaging scientist then entered lecture mode, telling me a variety of fun facts about proteins, including the wondrous functions they perform within the human body.

"Most proteins are fairly simple," Seymour said. "They contain just a few polypeptide chains which are strings of amino acids. Your renegade protein is composed of twenty plus polypeptide chains. It's a complex lady and it seems to have formed an "irreversible" bond with the nerve cell receptors on your muscles."

"Irreversible." I coughed.

"Sorry," Seymour said. "Perhaps some other protein exists that could cause this beast to migrate, but if there is such a substance, the odds of finding it would be long."

"Like a thousand to one."

"More like a billion to one," Seymour Giffs, Ph.D., predicted.

On the ride back to Leicester County Hospital, Smitty tried to convince me that Seymour Giffs was a stuffed shirt. He said Seymour was just trying to impress me with his "pretty pictures."

"What I heard was we know virtually nothing about proteins," Smitty said. "Your job is to figure them out and cure yourself. You can do it. You're a smart man. Rise to the challenge!"

As Smitty talked, I stared at my MacBook, which was open and facing me, strapped to the back of the van's driver seat with a bungee cord, per my usual driving arrangement. The screen saver was playing a slide show of Maria from our Halloween Party. I had watched the life-sustaining slides a million times, each picture pausing for five seconds before being swiped away by the next image. My favorite picture of Maria was a close-up of her face at our Halloween Party, fire engine red lipstick, the Bride of Frankenstein hair, and comically long eyelashes. The picture was taken while Maria was looking at me. It featured her insanely gorgeous smile and caring eyes. Smitty's words were appreciated, but it was Maria's image that inspired me to take my search for a cure to the next level. I had decided to never give up.

Over the next five years, much to the eventual chagrin of Smitty and a host of other readers who struggled to pronounce words like, adenine-uracil-guanine and dihydroxyacetone-phosphate, I hit the books and learned everything I possibly could about proteins, while generating at least one vial of Anti-me each week—based upon my latest prevailing hunch or theory. Slowly, I became a world-class expert on proteins, which I began to envision as animated origami. My specialty was a class of proteins called membrane proteins, which control the activities of cell walls, including the entry and exit of other proteins. I paid Seymour Giffs extra fees to increasingly refine the model of Betty, until I understood every nook and cranny of her complex cell walls, including every potential bonding point.

Ultimately, the complexity of proteins filled me with wonder and caused me to believe we were the product of a superior intelligence—I couldn't imagine that a random evolutionary process could ever spawn such complex and interdependent structures. Unexpectedly, my new knowledge had turned me into a somewhat spiritual man who believed anything was possible.

Unfortunately, as I became increasingly intelligent, the weight of my knowledge made it increasingly difficult for me to sustain my dream. I would obsess about individual polypeptide chains and their seeming lack of purpose. I would then reanalyze my prior trials and be astonished by the extent of my folly. At times, knowledge seemed to do little more for me than reveal the vastness of my ignorance.

Eventually, approximately five years into my formal search for my cure, after the failure of Anti-me version two hundred seventy-two, in a relatively rare fit of self-pity, I informed Smitty that I was giving up my quest for a cure. I said my extensive trials had yielded nothing more than a variety of rashes, useless erections, and an occasional involuntary whinny.

"Smitty, it's no use," I said. "I've tried everything."

I was expecting Smitty's usual pep talk, but this time, he chose an alternative approach. He understood my fanatical devotion to learning warranted a more thoughtful response.

"You once said you owed me a favor," Smitty said. "You said, you'd do anything for me."

"True," I admitted.

"Good," Smitty said. "I want you to go to church with me."

"Church. Jesus Christ, Smitty."

"Exactly,"

The following Thursday, I found myself en route to St. Beatrice of Shyshire. Smitty had dressed me in a black suit jacket with a white turtleneck. I was perplexed.

"Smitty, who goes to church on Thursday?"

"Only the holy," he responded.

Saint Beatrice Church was built in 1926, the same year the Pope Pius XI beatified a woman by the same name, who, after apparently seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, founded an order of nuns that celebrated the life of the mother of Jesus by praying instead of living.

The church was an impressive structure. It had a three-story vaulted ceiling and blue stained glass windows that depicted the Stations of the Cross: the death march of Jesus. The church uncomfortably sat three hundred in hardwood pews that never approached half-full, with the exception of Easter and Christmas. There was no handicapped ramp, quadriplegics not being known to drop envelopes in the collection basket.

Without gasping due to lack of breath or the presence of pain, Smitty carried me up the half flight of stairs to the entrance of St. Beatrice, wheelchair and all. As Smitty opened the front door of the Church, I noticed there was a note taped to its knocker; it read, "Emergency. I'll be back in thirty minutes. Yours in Christ, Father Frank."

I noticed Smitty was smiling as he tore down the note. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned," he muttered.

Once in the church, Smitty inserted me in the priest side of a confessional then turned on an indicator light meaning I was available to administer the sacrament of Penance.

"Pardon, my French, Smitty," I said. "But what the fuck do you think you're doing. I'm not a priest. I'm not even a twice a year Catholic."

"You're here to hear some confessions. Let the 'faithful' tell you their sins. Forgive them in the name of Jesus, and then tell 'em to say a few Hail Marys."

"Cut the shit, Smitty," I said. "This is wrong. I can't pretend I'm a priest."

"Too late," Smitty replied as he walked away. "You have a customer."

My first confessor sounded like he'd swallowed Johnny Cash.

"Bless me, Father for I have sinned," he grumbled. "It's been three years since my last confession and here are my sins…I sell drugs, drink like a fish, steal cars, and watch porno all day. I have two girlfriends, and I just got my wife's sister pregnant."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "I'm recommending hell."

"Recommending hell?" the man said. "That's not how this works. You're supposed to forgive my sins, and then tell me to say some prayers."

"Sorry, too late, buddy," I said. "Get a real job. Take care of your kids, and in a couple years, I may reconsider."

"Jesus," the man said.

"New rules," I said. "Live with it."

My next confessor was a young man; a teenager, I guessed. He said he was in love with the Channel Seven weather girl and that her beauty was causing him to "sin with himself" at least three times a day. I told him that as long as he cleaned up his mess, God didn't care.

"Awesome, Father," he responded. "I thought God would be upset."