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Sick: A Totally True Story
by Debby Dodds The toilet I am intimately engaged with is a mustard yellow with flower stickers on the lid. Who puts flower stickers on a toilet? Wishful thinking by the apartment's previous residents? I don't feel like this apartment is home and am glad I only signed a month-to-month lease last month. It is my third month of pregnancy, and this nausea is ripping me apart. I wasn't prepared for this pregnancy. I guess I always thought that eventually I'd be a Mom, but I thought I'd have a house and a husband and things like that, before I had a baby. Then again, I've never done things the conventional way. I dropped out of law school to pursue acting. I quit acting to go to Costa Rica to work in a cloudforest, documenting hummingbird patterns, and I met and slept with a grad student there who was working on his thesis about South American poets. I guess I really should have told him my real name and gotten his, but not doing so had seemed so enticing at the time. And I was on The Patch. Isn't that supposed to be almost foolproof? As I sit with my head hanging over the toilet, "puking up my guts," I ponder that phrase. Lord knows I don't have anything else to do right now. Frankly, I'm bored with all of this vomiting. Also, I think I'm more aware of words since my time with the poetry major in Costa Rica. "Puking up my guts." I don't have any food left in my system yet my stomach continues to spasm. What is happening? Could I actually dredge up an organ? Oh my god, would it be possible to throw up my unborn baby? A ridiculously morbid thought, but I am so listless from all this sickness, I am no longer appalled by my own dark thoughts, so I give them full rein. A friend of mine is the Assistant District Attorney of a city in Arizona. We met a long time ago when I was still in school. He is my only friend from those days. He was my photo negative; he always did everything he was supposed to do. He recently told me a story about something that came out of someone's stomach that nobody could have expected. My friend, the ADA, Alan, was invited to view the autopsy of a man who the state had a warrant out for, for a petty crime. This man had died under mysterious circumstances that involved a shooting. The shooting had nothing to do with the petty crime that the man in question was wanted for. The petty crime involved a failure to show up in court for a reckless driving violation. The cop on the case of the shooting came to Alan's office. "You know that guy you asked our department to bring in last week? Well no can do. He's dead." "Oh, I'll take his name off the list then," Alan said.
That's when they got talking. The cop said he was going to the autopsy of the
petty criminal. Alan mentioned he'd never seen a dead body. The cop offered to
bring him along.
Before the autopsy started, Alan learned the details of the death. The man who
was to be dissected in front of Alan had worked as a video store clerk when he
wasn't out driving recklessly. He was married. No children. The day of his
death, he was working in the video store when he was propositioned by a man, who
came in the store to, ostensibly, check out the porn section. The man asked the
video store clerk if he wanted to have some afternoon sex. Presumably, the video
store clerk had never met this guy before but he said, "Sure, why not?" Unfortunately for the video store clerk, his new friend was only hustling him to get him into a secluded space with his pants down so he could steal his wallet. As this was revealed to our video store guy in the carwash, he acted surprisingly fast, and without shame, and took off running out of the carwash with his pants down around his ankles. The would-be-wallet-thief was more than just a thief, when, out of frustration I guess, he shot the video store clerk in the back. The force of the bullet pushed the video store clerk into the street, into the path of a moving car, and the car pushed the video store clerk into the front pane of his video store, where he crumpled to the ground, dead. The cop filled Alan in on all of this on the drive over to the coroner's office. As they entered the building, Alan felt a little trepidation and a little excitement. As the medical examiner, aware of the circumstances or the video store clerk's demise, and looking for the cause of death - the bullet or the car's impact - made ready to make the cuts in the body, my friend Alan, the lawyer, and his friend the cop, watched from the sidelines, behind protective glass. Alan wasn't sure what to expect, as this was his first autopsy, but nobody, not even the most seasoned autopsy-watcher could have predicted what would happen next. As the doctor cut into the video store clerk's abdomen, a giant penis came springing out. It bounced around the room a bit before it settled, in all its glory, on the floor, near the foot of the examiner. It was about ten inches long, very pink and very lifelike. It even had veins. It had been trapped in the man's stomach. It had, originally, been in his butt. It turns out, the wife of the video store clerk confirmed to the police, the video store clerk liked to wear dildoes up his butt while he was working. It seems that when the video store clerk was propelled forward by the bullet, the phallus ripped through his body and ended up in his stomach cavity. It was the actual cause of death. Now, if this was possible, I muse on my bathroom floor, my head still near the toilet, it certainly makes me wonder what other things could move through your body if enough force were to be involved. But I am relatively sure my baby is safe inside of me. Strangely, instead of exacerbating my queasiness, remembering the details of this story quells my morning sickness a bit. I remember how, in Costa Rica, I had a bad morning of sickness after eating some fruit that I now suspect had been washed in the local water. I was sitting in the shade, trying to drink a coke in a smooth, cool glass bottle when I saw the man who would be my baby's father for the first time. He was wearing a blue bandana, sunglasses and khaki shorts, and had just come out of a library, onto the dusty main road of the little town of Monteverde. Monteverde had been settled by the Quakers to preserve a place for peace. He saw me sitting outside the internet cafe and he smiled at me. At that moment I thought, "Sure, why not?" I smiled back, and waited for him to come over. I pat my belly and think of Alan's offer to help me raise the baby. I'd have to move to Arizona so he could keep his job as the ADA. I have a hard time seeing myself living in Arizona, although I do like how Alan laughed when he told me the story of the dildo in the video store clerk's stomach. I love that he enjoys the inappropriate. I
manage to drag myself back to my bed where I can further worry about what kind
of world I am bringing my baby into. A world of flying rubber phalluses and
women who sleep with men in blue bandanas just because they happen to know who
Richard Brautigan is. Was I right to not terminate my pregnancy? Was it wrong to
not take the predictable path in life? Would everything work out okay? Would my
baby love me? As I drift off to sleep under a thin Amish quilt my mom gave me
before I left for California, I think, "Sure, why not?"
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